Johannesburg | Monday
EUGENE de Kock, the apartheid state’s most notorious assassin, is to ask President Thabo Mbeki to free him from a life prison sentence, a report said on Sunday.
De Kock’s lawyer, Schalk Hugo, told the Afrikaans-language Rapport newspaper that only a political decision could save his client from spending the rest of his life behind bars.
De Kock, a former police commander dubbed ”Prime Evil” for his proficiency at killing, was found guilty of 89 apartheid-era crimes and sentenced to 212 years in prison in 1996.
He made 112 applications for amnesty to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), confessing to more than 100 incidents of murder, torture and fraud. He succeeded in only 54 of the applications.
The TRC, set up to probe apartheid-era human rights violations on all sides, was obliged to grant amnesty for political offences, provided full disclosure was made by the perpetrator.
But the commission in May rejected an application by De Kock and eight colleagues of the police death squad he headed for amnesty for killing five men and blowing up the body of one of the victims with explosives in eastern South Africa in 1992.
He had been given a life sentence plus an additional 80 years in prison for the murders.
Hugo said he would make the application to Mbeki soon after the TRC submits its final report to him later this month.
De Kock told the newspaper from his prison cell that he wanted to be freed not so much because he is in jail, ”but because I am the only one.”
He has in the past complained bitterly that he was left carrying the can for political murders ordered by his apartheid bosses, who have walked away scot-free.
He was, he said, not asking for forgiveness.
”I do not believe in it. Murder is murder,” he told Rapport. – AFP