OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday
THE Truth and Reconciliation Commission has reserved judgment in a former military intelligence operative’s application for amnesty for planning the bomb attack which maimed Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs.
Henri van der Westhuizen, 40, said that prior to the hearing he approached Sachs – who as an African National Congress activist lost an arm in a car bomb attack launched by the apartheid government’s security forces in Maputo in 1988 – to “get it behind me”.
On the planning of the bomb attack, Van der Westhuizen said it had been his job to supply intelligence information about “targets” to Pieter Botes of the shadowy Civil Co-operation Bureau, which carried out attacks on activists and liberation organisations.
Van der Westhuizen said the Sachs explosion had in fact been meant to kill ANC political/military committee member, Indress Naidoo.
In cross-examination, advocate George Bizos challenged Van der Westhuizen on his version that Sachs was a mistaken target.
He read an extract about an interview by journalist Jacques Pauw in his book “Into the Heart of Darkness” with “a senior member of the CCB” called Marius. The court heard that this was in fact Botes.
“You know, in a war it is sometimes better to maim and kill the enemy … everywhere Sachs went in Maputo, everyone would see the stump that his arm once was and say ‘Look the Boers blew it off’ knowing that we would do the same to anybody we chose,” Pauw quoted “Marius”.
Van der Westhuizen said if Botes did regard Sachs as a target, the operatives could have decided that killing Sachs was as good as killing Naidoo when they saw that Sachs was driving Naidoo’s car – which he had detailed in his report.
Apologising to Sachs and other victims whose deaths and suffering he was linked to, Van der Westhuizen said: “Many things today are not going the way we want but I think that if South Africans had extended their hands to one another long ago, we would have a better country”.
Van der Westhuizen’s amnesty application also related to his part in the murder of ANC activist Gibson Mondlane by poisoning, the death of three other activists in Lesotho in 1986, the abduction of activist Simon Mokgetlha from Maseru to Ladybrand, and conspiracy to murder ANC members in Mozambique and Swaziland during the 1980s.