Evidence is mounting that those responsible for this week’s bombings are from the same far right networks that spawned an alleged treason plot earlier this year.
Authorities, not least among them President Thabo Mbeki and Police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi, immediately, but tentatively, pointed fingers at the far right.
Mbeki said on Wednesday that the bombing campaign seemed consistent with “information that government has had for some time … that right-wing groups have intended to conduct a campaign of this kind”. But, he said, there was not yet any information that rightwingers were indeed responsible.
The available evidence, however, is enticing.
A senior police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed on Thursday that investigators were comparing the bombing devices used this week with devices seized by police earlier this year.
The earlier seizures include an arsenal found in an abandoned truck at Lichtenburg and a haul of bomb ingredients at a farm near Warmbaths. Both have been linked to the Boeremag, the organisation allegedly at the centre of a plot to overthrow the government.
Selebi has stated that Wednesday’s bombs were composed of ammonium nitrate. Witnesses described two of those bombs — one in Soweto that was defused and one in Bronkhorstspruit of which only the detonator exploded — as containing trigger devices that included clocks or alarm clocks.
A well-placed police investigator confirmed that there were great similarities between this week’s bombs and the Warmbaths devices.
The Warmbaths haul included 24 packs of explosives, mostly home-made from agricultural fertiliser –ammonium nitrate. Also found at the time, the Mail & Guardian has learnt, were trigger devices that included alarm clocks.
In the case of this week’s failed attempt to bomb a Buddhist temple at Bronkhorstpruit, one witness told the M&G of an army knapsack filled with “fertiliser”. With that, he said, was a taped-up plastic container containing a large alarm clock and what looked like a nine-volt battery.
Witnesses at a disused Soweto service station, where a bomb was defused, described a clock and a similar nine-volt battery.
Police started moving against the so-called Boeremag treason plotters around April, and by last month had arrested a total of 15 alleged con- spirators. Two more were nabbed on Wednesday, but alleged Boeremag leader Thomas Vogel Vorster (51), and two alleged accomplices, Johan Pretorius (31) and Herman van Rooyen (28), are still on the run.
Another pointer that this week’s bombings were the work of the same group, or at least the same wider network, is a letter received last week by Beeld newspaper. Purporting to be from Boeremag, it warned that there were “quite a few surprises in store for the [African National Congress/South African Communist Party] government”.
The letter stated that “the few arrests will have no effect on the struggle” and demanded that the 15 accused be immediately released “just like Mbeki’s 35 robbers and murderers” — an apparent reference to recent presidential pardons.
Police spokesperson Director Phuti Setati said on Thursday that police were compiling an identikit of a man they believed could assist them with their inquiries on the blasts. Setati said the two alleged Boeremag plotters arrested on Wednesday would appear in court on Friday and would not be named until then, but that there was “nothing at this stage” to link them to the blasts.