OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 4.30pm.
APARTHEID state assassin Eugene de Kock on Tuesday again fingered former president PW Botha as having sanctioned a bloody cross-border raid by police into neighbouring Lesotho in December 1985.
De Kock, who led the raid which left 11 people dead, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the attack was an international operation and must therefore have been authorised at the highest level.
“My perception was that state president PW Botha and the government were well aware that the attack would be launched,” he told the TRC’s amnesty committee.
De Kock, a former police death squad commander serving 212 years in jail for apartheid-era crimes, is asking for amnesty for the raid along with several other former policemen, including Johan van der Merwe, the deputy chief of the security police in 1985.
Whereas Van der Merwe has testified that the raid was purely a police operation, De Kock has in the past insisted the order for the raid came directly from Botha.
De Kock said on Tuesday that people like Botha, former intelligence chief Niel Barnard, and former foreign affairs director-general Neil van Heerden, have all tried to shift the blame on to Van der Merwe.
“[But] they were very much aware as they were snoring away in their beds in their holiday homes that there would be an attack,” De Kock said.
General Johann Coetzee, the former chief of the security police, has told the TRC he knew nothing about the raid as he was on holiday.
De Kock said it is plain that Botha and the Lesotho authorities were at loggerheads in the mid-1980s because the tiny kingdom surrounded by South Africa was harbouring ANC freedom fighters. Eight ANC militants and three Basotho were killed in the raid. — AFP