Death Squad Inquiry Clears S. Africa Police

A six-month-long judicial inquiry, investigating allegations that government death squads assassinated 71 political opponents, exonerated the police Tuesday but blamed a covert army unit for two murders.

Justice Louis Harms, who led the government-appointed commission, recommended that the authorities consider charges against army operatives for the two 1986 murders in Pretoria’s Mamelodi township, a 1989 bombing near Cape Town and plots to kill three political activists.

The report came as a major disappointment to human rights groups, which had persuaded President Frederik W. de Klerk to launch the independent probe after three former policemen confessed to the 1984 assassination of Durban civil rights attorney Griffiths Mxenge.

Anti-apartheid organizations had alleged that a shadowy army unit, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, and a secret police hit squad operating out of a farm near Pretoria had been responsible for hundreds of murders and political dirty tricks over the past decade.

But Harms said there was insufficient evidence to warrant charges in most of the cases because, among other things, witnesses had been unreliable and documents that might have substantiated the allegations had disappeared.

“My feeling is one of despair,” Max Coleman, a member of the Human Rights Commission, said. “But we must have been naive to think we’d get anything different.”

De Klerk said Tuesday that it is time for the country to put the entire matter behind it.

The president added that he had ordered a complete review of covert operations. But he said he found no reason to blame Defense Minister Magnus Malan or any others of his Cabinet ministers.

Malan, chief of the country’s military operations, has said he learned of the existence of the army’s Civil Cooperation Bureau only last November. The bureau, which was disbanded earlier this year, had 139 employees, about half of whom were employed by the army, and an annual budget of $10 million.

Justice Harms concluded that the bureau, a branch of the army’s special forces, had operated inside South Africa for several years “to disturb maximally the enemies of the state” and had given itself powers to “try, sentence and punish.”

Police officers had testified that the Civil Cooperation Bureau may have been responsible for a number of the 71 political killings recorded in recent years.

After hearing dozens of witnesses in 55 sessions from March to August, Harms recommended that only nine cases be submitted for further investigation.

The most serious of those was the Dec. 1, 1986, slaying of activist Fabian Ribiero and his wife, Florence, in Mamelodi. Evidence presented at the hearing suggested that a bureau agent, Noel Robey, who is now missing, may have been responsible for those deaths.

Harms also found sufficient evidence to suggest that bureau operatives planted a bomb that exploded last year at an anti-apartheid meeting in Athlone township, near Cape Town. No one was injured in that blast.

And Harms’ report said the evidence indicated that the bureau had been involved in plots to kill several anti-apartheid activists.

However, Harms gave no credence to allegations that a police counterinsurgency unit carried out political killings.

Three former policemen, including the unit’s white commander, had testified that they killed more than 10 people on instructions from police headquarters.