THE former head of apartheid’s security police, General Johan Coetzee, on Tuesday said he had no prior knowledge of a bloody cross-border raid by police into neighbouring Lesotho in 1985. Coetzee told a TRC hearing in Pretoria that at the time of the raid he was on holiday. “I did not know about the raid before it took place … I had no authority to sanction such an attack,” the retired police chief said. Coetzee and seven other apartheid-era senior policemen are applying for amnesty for the raid on two houses in Lesotho, in which eight ANC cadres and three Basotho were killed.