Evelyn Groenink and Mail & Guardian reporters
The special prosecutions team which is trying to prove that the Civil Co- operation Bureau’s (CCB) Witwatersrand unit, region six, is solely to blame for the murder of Anton Lubowski, and that the motive for the murder was purely political, may well be looking in the wrong place.
A former Durban-based recce, who later joined 5 Recce in Phalaborwa and maintained close contacts with the directorate of covert collections’s (DCC)Mafia network in the Ciskei, bragged to his colleagues that he had been personally asked “by important people” to assemble a team to kill Lubowski.
The recce, whose identity is known to the Mail & Guardian, had close contacts with the sanctions-busting network active in Namibia at the time. “He seemed to know details of the murder which were not published by the press at the time,” says a source, “such as the exact time and the way in which Lubowski was shot.”
The M&G has also been able to establish the alleged links between the recce and the sanctions-busting network. At least two office premises linked to the recce and a business partner are shared by companies known to have been involved in sanctions busting at the time.
The recce is also involved with illegal diamond trade in Namibia and has owned a “diamond construction” company since mid- 1989.
The special prosecutions team has stated that it works on the basis of a political motive for the Lubowski murder, and uses an alleged CCB hit list circulating in the pile of disinformation around the case as important evidence. The team has not asked why, of all the people on the “hit list”, only Lubowski was murdered.
Also, the discomfort of lower-ranking military intelligence and DCC operatives, tasked to do surveillance on Lubowski at the time of the murder, has not been taken into account.
Two DCC spies, Rich Verster and another whose name is known to the M&G, contacted their superiors after the murder to ask “why the hell” Lubowski had been killed, since the surveillance and the “recruitment process” were supposedly still in progress.
They never got an answer. If Lubowski had been a political target, murdered for his anti-apartheid stance, the surveillance team would not have expressed such surprise.
The kingpins of the former CCB region six, Staal Burger and “Chappie” Maree, deny they were in Windhoek at the time of the murder. It has also been cause for suspicion that only the small region six, which consisted of former members of the Brixton murder and robbery squad – of whom Ferdi Barnard and Staal Burger are the best known -has been been blamed for virtually all unsolved political assassinations in and outside South Africa. The other – reportedly more than 1 600 – members of the special forces who were assigned CCB tasks at different times, such as the recce mentioned above, have not been investigated.
The prosecutions team told the M&G it would include “[French oil company Elf representative Alain] Guenon and diamonds” in its investigation.
Later, however, the team made it clear that they do not feel it necessary to include the Vito Palazzolo connection in their case. It has also transpired that the team, after concluding the Lubowski case, intends to leave “old apartheid cases” alone and focus on “new cases”.
This would mean that the uncovered part of apartheid South Africa’s secret operations – identical with the military intelligence network – will be left intact, and that persistent allegations that privatised sections of the military are still out there, involved in organised crime and smuggling ivory, diamonds and arms, will be left untouched.