Former security policeman Gideon Nieuwoudt said on Monday he did not remember how he persuaded a trained freedom fighter to cooperate with him after being arrested.
Nieuwoudt is applying for amnesty for the 1989 car bomb murders of three black colleagues and an informer at Motherwell, outside Port Elizabeth, where the amnesty hearing is taking place.
He told the amnesty panel that when he interrogated the captured guerrilla earlier that year he “saw the gap” and developed a plan to infiltrate a police agent into the man’s organisation — which he did not name in his testimony.
Nieuwoudt said he forced the guerrilla to write a letter to his commander, which Nieuwoudt than gave to one of his own agents to take to Swaziland and thereby gain access to the organisation.
Asked by panel chairperson Judge Ronnie Pillay why the man wrote the letter, Nieuwoudt said usually if trained people infiltrated South Africa they had to make contact within 24 hours with their commander outside the country to report their safe arrival and say they needed weapons.
Asked by Pillay why the man wrote the letter after his arrest, Nieuwoudt replied: “On my request.”
He added that “as a result of the interrogation” the man was prepared to give the information.
Pressed by the judge on why the detainee cooperated, Nieuwoudt said: “I can’t really remember how it happened: it happened so long ago. But the effect was that he was prepared to make that contact for me.”
Pillay’s co-panelist advocate Francis Bosman said although she accepted Nieuwoudt could not recall details he should be able to remember if pressure (she used the Afrikaans word “dwang“) was involved.
“Certainly, Mr Chairman, pressure was placed on him,” said Nieuwoudt.
Asked by Bosman whether he personally put pressure on the detained man, Nieuwoudt said: “That is so.”
He said he later heard through another agent that the man he sent to Swaziland was being held at the African National Congress’s detention camp Quattro in Angola.
Nieuwoudt, who headed the security police’s intelligence unit in the Eastern Cape at the time of the Motherwell killings, is applying for amnesty along with two former colleagues, Wybrand du Toit and Marthinus Ras.
They had admitted to killing Warrant Officer Glen Mgoduka, Sergeant Amos Faku, Sergeant Desmond Mpipa and Xolile Sakati, also known as Charles Jack.
The three men, who have all been convicted in criminal court for the murders, were refused amnesty after an initial hearing in 1997.
In a civil case in 2001, the Cape High Court ordered their application be heard afresh by a new panel. — Sapa
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