Friday’s public hearings of the Hefer Commission are expected to provide greater clarity on the availability of apartheid-era intelligence files to aid its investigation.
Advocate George Bizos SC is scheduled to make a submission during the day on behalf of the country’s intelligence agencies.
He will be representing the ministers of safety and security, intelligence services and defence, as well as the secretary for defence, the national police commissioner and the directors general of the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Secret Service.
This will follow a request by the commission, on behalf of main accusers Mac Maharaj and Mo Shaik, for a wide range of apartheid-era files. These apparently also include documents now held by the police and defence force’s intelligence units.
Last week, Judge Joos Hefer indicated that at that stage the commission did not have any probative documentation. He said documents should form an important part of his eventual finding on whether national director of public prosecutions
Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy.
The National Intelligence Agency later issued a statement saying it was facing legal constraints with regard to providing the requested files. It was legally obliged to protect its sources and methods, the NIA maintained.
Witnesses to be called before the commission on Friday are Mbulelo Hongo and the government official who handled Ngcuka’s passport application in the eighties.
A September newspaper report suggested that Ngcuka was granted this passport by the apartheid government in return for spying on his former activist comrades.
Hongo was jailed together with Ngcuka in 1982 for refusing to testify in a treason trial. – Sapa