alien’
Marianne Merten
The Aliens Control Act was used to arrest international fugitive and American embassy bombings suspect Khalfan Khamis Mohamed and deport him to the United States.
Mohamed applied for permission to stay in South Africa pending an application for political asylum under the false name of Zahran Nassor Maulid.
New York-based FBI representative Joseph Valiquette says the FBI knew when Mohamed arrived in South Africa but did not wish to reveal this information for “investigative reasons”.
Mohamed appeared in a Manhattan court last Friday and pleaded not guilty to more than 200 counts of murder, conspiracy to murder and international terrorism.
US law enforcement authorities have been looking for him since the bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, on August 7 last year. The two explosions killed 224 people and injured more than 5 000.
US officials believe Mohamed was the key planner of the Dar es Salaam blast. His arrest comes after an international search of more than a year. US law enforcement officials approached every intelligence agency worldwide with a request to be on the lookout for certain individuals.
Department of Home Affairs officials picked up a suspect on the list the Americans sent out. It turned out to be a false lead. But while rechecking details officials bagged Mohamed.
South African intelligence services passed the information on to Interpol, which then forwarded the details to the FBI.
Members of the Scorpions special investigations unit had been monitoring Mohamed’s movements for some time. Local investigators were probing a link to the Planet Hollywood blast which killed two people at the V&A Waterfront last year.
Last Tuesday a team of immigration officials arrested Mohamed near the Cape Town Refugee Centre where he had to renew his Section 41 permit.
He arrived in Cape Town in September 1998 and found work in Athlone. After his arrest for illegally entering the country under a false name – an offence under Section 44 of the Aliens Control Act – Mohamed was kept in custody for at least two days and interviewed by various officials.
Tanzanian High Commissioner Ami Mpungwe says suspects could stand trial in the US or in the East African country.
He added South Africa and Tanzania have co-operated in this matter and other crime issues.
US embassy representative Valerie Crites says it is “delighted with the co-operation from the South African government”.
@An African citizen with a white skin
John Matshikiza
WHO IS … TIM DU PLESSIS?
It would be easy to say Tim du Plessis is a typical Afrikaner who saw the light just in time to avoid going down with the sinking ship of apartheid, and is now doing his best to stay afloat on the choppy seas of the New South Africa. But what’s the real story?
Du Plessis doesn’t want to make it too easy to get to the meat of the matter. He’s just been appointed editor of The Citizen, a newspaper with controversial origins, and although it is now accepted as being just another daily paper (and not a bad one at that) it still has a slight whiff of its Broederbond parentage about it. His reticence might have something to do with a sense of caution about committing himself to exactly what he can do to bring this institution of the ancien regime truly up to speed with the demands of the rainbow present.
It’s all about identity. Who is Tim du Plessis? Well, who am I to be asking? When I suggested a Melville eatery called Le Petit Pain for our rendezvous, he immediately asked me to pronounce the snooty French name again, so that he could get it right. “I don’t have a European background like you do, you see,” he commented, getting right to the point before we’d even met. “I’ve only got a white skin. But otherwise, I’m an African.” I could see I would have to be on my guard.
Du Plessis had an easy enough start in journalism in the safe old days of Uncle John Vorster. He got a bursary from Nasionale Pers (Naspers) to study journalism at Rand Afrikaans University. >From 1974 to 1976 he had a guaranteed holiday job at the conservative daily Beeld, and after he graduated he automatically became one of the Beeld staffers, churning out the kind of affirmative stories that Beeld was expected to churn out.
Then the world was turned upside down. “When FW de Klerk made his historic speech on February 2 1990,” says Du Plessis, “those of us on the team at Beeld realised that there were going to be major developments that we would have to deal with. We realised immediately that the dominance of white politics was at an end. I think we did a remarkable job in changing the direction of the paper. It wasn’t that we switched allegiances from one party to another – we switched our values, moving towards a
position of supporting values that we believed were correct.”
He undersells himself. He had started exploring for future years before, attending the African National Congress’s national conference at Arusha in 1987, and paying a secret visit to the Soviet Union in 1988.
The remarkable thing was that, as Du Plessis and his colleagues transformed the old National Party mouthpiece into a dynamic journal that challenged and explored the issues of the new South Africa, they managed to take the bulk of their previous readership with them. Speaking in Afrikaans to hard-core Afrikaners, they set off down the new and uncharted road, becoming one of the country’s most lively and interesting dailies.
Beeld had become just one of the titles in the bizarrely South African Noah’s Ark of Naspers. In November last year Du Plessis was moved to City Press, one of its sister publications, a Sunday paper created exclusively for a black readership. His title was deputy editor, which meant that in day-to-day newsgathering he was basically the boss. But suddenly he was in another accelerated learning curve.
“When I arrived, there were misgivings from the black journalists, but I don’t think it was acrimonious. I made it clear that I was prepared to do anything to advance the cause of the paper, that’s what I was there for. I learned more in one year at City Press than in … five years at Beeld. I’d sit in the daily diary conferences, and these guys would talk about people who were obviously household names to everyone in the black community, but whom I had never heard of.”
Then came the call from Caxton, owners of The Citizen, and a challenge to leave the Naspers nest for the first time in 23 years of journalism. The Citizen has a decent circulation (120 000) spread across a very representative population sample -60% black, 31% white and 9% “other”, as they used to say. He sees his task as to maintain its reputation as a “newspaper of record”, and to develop its potential in a broad market. He won’t say too much more at this stage.
But it’s an interesting move – an Afrikaner who comes out of a black weekly to take the helm of an English-language daily tabloid. It’s a courageous position to hold amid the challenges of South Africa.
“There used to be three pillars of Afrikaans culture,” he says. “The NP, the Afrikaans churches and the Afrikaans cultural organisations. Those three pillars are either changing, or they have died. But the Afrikaners who lived under the roof supported by those three pillars are still around. We’re a group of people in the process of becoming a new nation, part of an inclusive nation of South Africans.”
TIM DU PLESSIS IS CERTAINLY A GALLANT SEEKER IN THE QUEST FOR THAT NEW PROFILE.