The Director General in President Thabo Mbeki’s office, Reverend Frank Chikane, says he now knows the identity of police officers who poisoned him in the late 1980s.
In a statement from the Presidency on Monday, it noted that Chikane, a former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, had revealed at his church in Soweto on Sunday ”that he now has information about his poisoning, starting from its authorisation from the highest levels of the apartheid government, through the military and police command lines, up to the operational unit which sprayed his clothes with a chemical meant to induce a heart attack, with the intention of killing him”.
The statement, released by spokesperson David Hlabane, reported: ”The affected officers of the apartheid security police are said to have made submissions to the National Prosecution Authority [NPA] on details relating to the attempt to kill Reverend Chikane in terms of the prescribed guidelines to deal with post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission matters.”
Since former apartheid police minister Adriaan Vlok made a confession recently — in Chikane’s office at the Union Buildings and at his Naledi AFM Church where Chikane is a pastor — and asked for forgiveness, ”the information I was looking for relating to my near fatal poisoning has been brought to my attention”, explained Chikane.
”I now know the chain of command to eliminate me. I know the people who were involved and how they did it. I am also told that the people involved, including those who are part of the command structure, are ready to meet me and ask for forgiveness for attempting to kill me.
”Once the NPA has given a green light for them to talk to me, we will do so immediately,” said Chikane in the address to his congregation.
Chikane told the congregation that he thanked God for saving his life and that he believed God spared him for a purpose.
He expressed a hope that the NPA would facilitate a process that will enable perpetrators ”to come forward to give us more information or lead us to other persons who may have more information about other comrades who were on the ‘official death list’ discussed by the joint high command of the military and police for the purposes of eliminating them”.
Chikane concluded by expressing the hope that more and more people who have information about some of the cases of gross violation of human rights would come forward to help South Africa close this chapter of the pain of the past. — I-Net Bridge