The Hefer commission will hear more about National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka’s much-discussed passport when it resumes its public hearings on Friday.
Commission secretary John Bacon said on Thursday Durban attorney KE Mlabe is to testify before Judge Joos Hefer.
In earlier testimony before the commission it was alleged that he was the attorney who was handed Ngcuka’s passport for safekeeping after he (Ngcuka) was imprisoned in the early eighties.
The apartheid government’s granting of the passport to Ngcuka is one of the main pillars of allegations that he acted as a spy for the apartheid government.
Martha Duma Tutu earlier refuted this by telling the commission that Ngcuka applied for the passport through her travel agency before the security police arrested him in 1981.
The agency was a front for the African National Congress to arrange travel documents for activists going into exile. The passport was granted while Ngcuka was in detention and before he was sentenced, Tutu testified.
She picked it up on his behalf from the erstwhile department of bantu affairs. She later handed it to Mlabe after the security police started harassing her.
Ngcuka reportedly used the passport after his release from prison to travel to Switzerland, where he joined his wife.
His main accuser, Mo Shaik, questioned the fact that the apartheid government apparently failed to enforce travel restrictions on Ngcuka. This suggested that he worked for them, Shaik maintained.
He argued that Ngcuka should have been blacklisted by the time the passport was granted, or at least after his release from prison.
Bacon said on Thursday the Department of Home Affairs was still perusing its records to find more information about Ngcuka’s passport for the commission.
The government pension fund would hand the commission a letter on Friday confirming that self-confessed apartheid spy Vanessa Brereton qualified for benefits. This resulted from her employment as a government agent during the eighties.
The fund has already confirmed that Ngcuka did not qualify for similar benefits.
Ngcuka was earlier accused of having acted as apartheid agent RS452, but Brereton has confessed she was this spy. – Sapa