Ivor Powell and Mungo Soggot
Former state president PW Botha could face prosecution in connection with the grisly 1985 killing of eight East Rand youth activists by booby-trapped grenades.
Botha has been named in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty application of South African police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe as having authorised what has come to be known as the “Zero-Zero Operation” in which the activists, members of the United Democratic Front, blew themselves up with grenades from which the timing pins had been removed by South African police technical expert Colonel WAL du Toit.
The grenades were provided by former Vlakplaas killer Joe Mamasela, who had infiltrated East Rand UDF structures under the command of Vlakplaas kingpin Eugene de Kock. Apart from the eight fatalities, seven other youths were seriously injured in the explosion.
Van der Merwe claims he was told by former police minister Louis le Grange that the operation was authorised at Cabinet level, with the approval of Botha himself.
Twelve former members of the apartheid state’s security forces are applying for amnesty. Mamasela was promoted to the rank of sergeant after the mission was successfully completed.
The possibility of legal action against Botha for the East Rand killings coincides with moves to bring him to book for his alleged participation in the murder of Matthew Goniwe, the Eastern Cape activist murdered in a state-sponsored hit in 1985.
Lawyers representing the Goniwe family have applied to the amnesty committee to reopen the amnesty application for Goniwe’s killers in the light of sensational new evidence which implicates Botha and his Cabinet.
The new evidence consists of minutes from a State Security Council meeting chaired by Botha in March 1984. At the meeting the then minister of Bantu education, Barend du Plessis, suggested that Goniwe be “eliminated”.
Two days later, state assassins started planning the hit which was to take place a year later.