OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday
A FORMER Military Intelligence agent has revealed a bizarre scheme to kill an ANC spy with mamba poison to cover up the SA Defence Force’s role in the execution of five Mozambican resistance fighters.
Testifying in the trial of apartheid chemical warfare expert Wouter Basson, former MI commander Cornelius Johannes van Niekerk said the double role of Roland Hunter, who was sent to jail for his activities on behalf of the African National Congress in the 1980s, had been “a severe embarrassment” for the SADF.
Hunter was eventually allowed to plead guilty to charges lesser than the original one of high treason so that the SADF’s involvement with Renamo could be kept quiet. The plan to kill him with mamba poison was never taken further.
Hunter had known about the SADF’s execution of five men suspected of assassinating Mozambican resistance movement Renamo secretary-general Orlando Christina.
Van Niekerk, who has been offered indemnity from prosecution in exchange for his evidence, told the Pretoria High Court that he arranged for the suspects and the Renamo War Council to be transported to the Caprivi Strip in Angola, where a hearing was held inside a bungalow.
He arranged for tarpaulins in which to wrap the bodies, chains to weigh them down when they were thrown into the sea and rubber gloves for those who had to handle them.
Van Niekerk was among a group of white South Africans who accompanied the War Council to Angola, but the group did not attend the hearing, choosing to have a braai and make coffee.
They were preparing for a long evening when they suddenly heard shots. He later found out that the suspects had been shot dead inside the bungalow.
Van Niekerk said he found the experience traumatic because it was clear that they had been shot more than once and that some of them tried to ward off the bullets. There were bullet wounds in their arms.
The War Council returned to South Africa before the bodies were picked up and dropped somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
Basson has pleaded not guilty to a charge of incitement to murder, or alternatively conspiracy to murder or defeating the ends of justice by preventing a proper police investigation of Christina’s murder.