Police Commissioner George Fivaz may not have been telling the whole truth when he branded Deon Mostert a liar, report Ivor Powell and Marianne Merten
Deon Mostert, the man National Police Commissioner George Fivaz branded a “chronic liar”, passed a lie-detector test administered by police counter-intelligence less than six months ago.
Mostert, detained last week in connection with the St Elmo’s bombing in Cape Town, was put through the lie detector test while working with a police anti-corruption squad based in Gauteng – one of several startling details about his work with the police that emerged this week.
Mostert’s dual role as bomb suspect and police informer has spotlighted serious divisions within South Africa’s crime fighting apparatus and exposed senior policemen – including Fivaz himself – to a string of embarrassing contradictions.
The outgoing commissioner hit out at Mostert’s credibility last week in an attempt to put a lid on the debacle and exonerate several senior Cape policemen Mostert implicated in alleged corruption.
Fivaz’s attempts at damage control have bumped up against sensational new revelations about Mostert from high-ranking sources in crime-fighting agencies. Mostert, it has now emerged, was working on a top secret probe into police corruption in the Western Cape. The probe was launched by the police anti-corruption unit (ACU) in Gauteng. The Independent Complaints Directorate, the police watchdog, this week started investigating some of Mostert’s claims of corruption and of police complicity in the Cape bombings.
The Mail & Guardian’s sources have confirmed that the outgoing police commissioner attempted to discredit Mostert shortly after Mostert emerged from interrogation by the serious violent crimes unit under Director Leonard Knipe – himself the main target of the secret corruption probe.
Senior police and intelligence sources said this week that Knipe had had access to documents from the anti-corruption probe – including a docket about himself – throughout the 48 hours in which Mostert was in the Knipe unit’s custody.
Mostert has played an extraordinary role in the bombing saga – he was first branded a suspect, then revealed to be a police informer, and finally rubbished by Fivaz. Early this week Mostert was receiving “psychiatric care” in a Cape hospital, having been admitted because of suicidal feelings and fears for his life. He was subsequently transferred to Pollsmoor prison hospital. He will apply for bail when he next appears in court on February 9.
Despite Fivaz’s damning snubs, police sources this week emphasised Mostert’s value as an informer; one top intelligence source said that days before the St Elmo’s bombing on Sunday November 28, Mostert accurately predicted a major bomb attack would hit Cape Town on that Sunday.
The prediction was made by Mostert while visiting connections of his at Malmesbury prison, who passed the information back to the police. Mostert also reportedly confessed to an involvement in the earlier bombing of the Greenpoint gay hangout, the Blah Bar.
These revelations are inconsistent with Fivaz’s efforts to discredit Mostert who, apart from being dismissed as a liar, has been portrayed as nothing more or less than a common thief wanted on car and microwave oven theft charges.
Three senior intelligence sources confirmed that the ACU probe centred on Knipe himself and his alleged role in the ongoing acts of terrorism.
Senior security sources emphasised that all the allegations against Knipe remained untested and unproven.
Before linking up with the ACU, Mostert was an informer with the Western Cape murder and robbery unit, formerly headed up by Knipe. Mostert boasted on various occasions that he enjoyed the protection of Knipe as well as other senior police officers associated with the unit.
Mostert was subjected to a police counter-intelligence polygraph test before being formally taken on to the secret ACU investigation. The polygraph test was ordered by a top officer in the ACU, apparently suspicious of Mostert’s bona fides. It was only after the would- be informant passed the polygraph scrutiny that secret funding for the operation was approved.
At the same time the two Gauteng-based ACU policemen spearheading the operation, a Captain Nolte and an Inspector Neft, were authorised to employ undercover tactics – including the use of false number plates on official vehicles.
Nolte and Neft were the two policemen found in a car with Mostert in Beaufort West when he was arrested last week. The ACU had put false number plates on the vehicle in which the three men were traveling as they sought to spirit Mostert out of the Cape and to their headquarters in Gauteng.
This escapade followed a period of several weeks during which Mostert had been incommunicado. The M&G understands that Mostert – after ostensibly going to Cape Town to collect information in October – had broken contact with his handlers, who no longer knew how to contact him. Neither, sources said, did crime intelligence chief Jeremy Veary, who by this time had apparently teamed up with the ACU operatives in the Mostert investigations.
But in the wake of the St Elmo’s bombing and after being informed that Mostert had accurately predicted the St Elmo’s bomb date, his handlers were desperate to contact him.
Police sources told the M&G that Mostert’s handlers, anxious to question their elusive informer, had organised the issuing of his identikit in an attempt to make contact with him. This was done in consultation with the top brass of Operation Good Hope, which later published the identikit.
The strategy worked: an apparently distraught Mostert contacted the ACU’s Nolte shortly after he caught sight of his picture.
At this point, the M&G has learned, the ACU detectives, apparently with the authorisation of Operation Good Hope brass, bundled Mostert into a police vehicle with false number plates and made off for Gauteng.
But a roadblock had, mysteriously, been set up to prevent them from moving their informer. Mostert was arrested and taken back to Cape Town. There, along with the paperwork, tapes and videotaped records of the ACU operation, he was allegedly handed over to Knipe for questioning.
Although Knipe seems to have distanced himself in the wake of last week’s fiasco, a superintendent described in police and legal circles as one of his right-hand men, Johan Coetzer, is investigating the various theft charges against Mostert.
Mostert’s work for the ACU laid the ground for 13 investigation dockets. Among the allegations Mostert cited were that senior policemen were passing on information to People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) members and that senior policemen were in contact with suspected bombers associated with the movement.
Mostert also reported to his handlers that on occasions Cape policemen had procured girls for sex from a local lock-up reform school. During his stint as an informer, Mostert was able to buy a police bullet- proof vest as well as illegal firearms on the black market in order to prove his bona fides.