Wally Mbhele
Former Transvaal attorney general Jan d’Oliviera – suspected of tampering with new evidence resulting from a trial he prosecuted – has started a battle to defend his reputation.
D’Oliveira was the prosecutor in the trial in which three African National Congress members were convicted of the 1993 Eikenhof killings.
The Pan Africanist Congress later told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission its military wing was responsible for these killings, saying they had nothing to do with the ANC.
Two key state witnesses subsequently confessed to being influenced by the police into implicating the three, who have applied to the court to have their convictions set aside. But both witnesses changed their stories again and reverted back to their original testimony after they were personally interviewed by D’Oliviera in December last year. The defence argues they were unduly pressured.
With just two weeks before the resumption of a bail application in the Pretoria High Court for the Eikenhof Three, D’Oliviera has attacked the ANC and the PAC for “intimidation” and “political propaganda”.
In papers before the court, D’Oliviera accuses the ANC and “unknown people” of influencing and intimidating the two witnesses to change their evidence.
He criticises the PAC for attempting to “misuse” the truth commission process and defends the integrity of the controversial former commander of the Brixton murder and robbery unit, Charlie Landman, who is accused of bribing witnesses.
Legal counsel for the Eikenhof Three have suggested D’Oliviera – who is now deputy national director of public prosecutions – was responsible for the witnesses’ somersault in their testimony. They had earlier confessed under oath that police had influenced them to implicate the three activists.
Abel Korope and Nelson Mpunge played a crucial role in tipping the scales of justice against Boy Ndweni, Siphiwe Bholo and Sipho Gavin before they were convicted of murder in 1994.
Korope claimed that Landman promised him R250 000 if he destroyed the alibis of two of the accused men, while Mpunge told D’Oliviera’s deputy at the time, Anton Ackerman, that police coached him on who to point out at an identity parade.
Bholo, Ndweni and Gavin were sentenced to death (later commuted to life) for the murders of Zandra Mitchely, her 14-year-old son Shaun and his friend Claire Silberbauer.
However, their guilt was questioned last year after Azanian Peoples Liberation Army commander Siphiwe Dolo applied for amnesty for the killings. The truth commission has yet to schedule his hearing.
D’Oliviera describes the PAC’s admission of guilt as political propaganda and says that while one of his witnesses was intimidated, the other one buckled under pressure and media attention and gave a supplementary affidavit “in a rush to please everyone”.
D’Oliviera argues that Mpunge’s statement was “obtained about four years after the event and without Mpunge being given the opportunity to check his previous evidence to refresh his memory.
“In a later statement he declares that he made the statement because of doubts that were spread by newspaper reports. It is suggested that the witness was influenced by persons unknown to change his evidence because he is seen as the key in bringing about the setting aside of the guilty verdicts against the applicants,” D’Oliviera says.
He contends that no false testimony was obtained by any member of the police.
But, he argues, “this is precisely what the applicants and certain ANC members did during the case and afterwards. Such blatant interference with the judicial process and state witnesses brings the judicial process into discredit and places it under inhuman pressure.
“What is especially worrying is the fact that the representatives of the ANC at Shell House were aware of the fact that [Oupa] Kulashe [a defence witness] intimidated Korope and nothing was done about it. Obvious character assassination was committed in the case of witness Landman, and this with the purpose of breaking down his credibility in order to get the [Eikenhof Three] acquitted.”