Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) president Letlapa Mphahlele has appealed to the government to reveal the real killers of the Highgate hotel massacre in East London 13 years ago, reported the South African Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday.
Mphahlele was speaking at the hotel at the first public commemoration of the May 1 1993 attack.
The PAC’s armed wing, the Azanian People’s Association (Apla) was blamed for the attack, which left five dead and seven wounded, three of them permanently disabled. Nobody applied for amnesty for it and nobody has been prosecuted.
Mphahlele repeated his earlier denials that the perpetrators were from Apla, saying that as Apla’s former commander he would have known about it.
Late last year, the survivors heard from a former police investigator and Mphahlele that the attackers were probably acting on behalf of the then apartheid government, presumably to whip up emotions in the run-up to the 1994 election.
”Actually I think the state is withholding some information about the Highgate massacre, because if you have to compare the Highgate massacre with the Mthatha massacre, in Mthatha five schoolchildren were killed and the state to this day is withholding the names of the people who actually killed these children,” said Mphahlele.
The Mthatha massacre was the attack on a PAC member’s home in Mthatha in October 1993 by the former government’s South African Defence Force, in which the children were killed. At the time, the government confirmed responsibility for the action and said it was aimed at Apla members.
Tuesday’s commemoration was organised by the Highgate Survivors’ Support Group, which was established last year.
”Nobody has ever come forward as a group to commemorate the Highgate,” said spokespersons for the group Neville Beling and Neville Harris on Monday. ”We as a group are breaking 14 years of silence in honouring those who lost their lives and were injured. Now their souls can be put to rest and we can find some closure.”
Beling was severely injured in the attack and Harris’s son Deon died in it.
The group is appealing for information on the attack and has asked anyone with information to call Tel: 082 877 2168. — Sapa