With the spotlight on South Africa’s security agencies’ ability to prevent terrorism following Wednesday’s bomb blasts near Johannesburg, the National Assembly on Thursday approved four bills to enhance the effectiveness of the intelligence services.
Intelligence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told Parliament government had invested a great deal of time over the past two years to help the country deal with such ”ruthless behaviour”.
”For us in the intelligence community this has meant a complete restructuring of the intelligence dispensation to ensure that we are able to deal with the scourge of terrorism.”
The four intelligence bills would complete that restructuring process. ”These kinds of desperate attention-seeking strategies will not work, because the security services of this country are more than able to deal with this.
”We are able to give this assurance because we have invested so much time in ensuring that we can turn to our security agencies to deal with exactly that,” Sisulu said.
Meanwhile, Sisulu’s defence colleague Mosiuoa Lekota told the Reuters news agency that South Africa was investigating white rightwingers in the army and police who could be part of a plot to plunge the country into a race war.
”It is quite clear that there is a group of disaffected whites, however maverick in character,” Lekota reportedly said. ”It certainly does not represent the majority of Afrikaners …but a residue within the South African National Defence Force and the South African Police Service as well.
”They are a racially-orientated group. They want to achieve a race war, that’s what they want,” he said.
Lekota said there was no evidence of a military link to the series of bombings in Gauteng on Wednesday. A small numbers of white rightwingers opposed to South Africa’s democracy remained in all sectors of society, but especially in the farming communities, the defence force, the police, the civil service and even some churches.
”They don’t constitute a majority anywhere… Wherever you find them, they are extremely in the minority but they have the capacity to be extremely destructive,” he said.
Meanwhile a top team of detectives continued there investigations on Thursday into the bombing, following up several leads and information, police said.
Director Henriette Bester said she had spoken to the co-ordinator of the task team but that no person or organisation could yet be linked to the blasts.
It was established that ammonium nitrate, an explosive commonly used in the mining industry, was used to manufacture the bombs. The task team comprises experts from different units, Bester said, and included the forensic laboratory, serious and violent crimes unit, intelligence service and units investigating crimes against the state.
Bester could not say exactly how many policemen were investigating the blasts, but said that the number assigned to the task team was ”adequate”.
Hospital authorities in Soweto said the condition of the 51-year-old man who was injured in the blast was satisfactory. Simon Sikwati was injured and his 42-year-old wife Claudina Mokane, killed, when debris from a bomb blast hit their shack in the Protea South informal settlement. The couple were the only casualties in the bombings.
In London, Former President Nelson Mandela said the bomb blasts were the work of criminal extremists. Mandela said through a representative that South Africa had a highly competent security force who would ”track down every one of those criminals”.
”This is the work of extremists who do not have the capacity to weigh the consequences of their criminal actions.” – Sapa