Bomb Kills ANC Lawyer Who Tracked Hit Squads : South Africa: Explosive is hidden in headphones. Colleagues say attack was intended for someone else.

An African National Congress legal expert who has been investigating government hit squads was killed Saturday in his Soweto home by a bomb planted in the headphones of a portable tape player, police said.

But the victim, Bheki Mlangeni, 35, apparently was not the intended target, his colleagues said. The tape player, along with a cassette labeled “evidence of hit squads,” had originally been mailed last May to Dirk Coetzee, a former police captain who fled to Zambia after making allegations of police assassinations of government opponents.

Mlangeni’s Johannesburg law firm, Cheadle, Thomson and Haysom, said that when Coetzee did not collect the parcel in Zambia it was stamped “return to sender” and sent to Johannesburg. A false return address on the parcel listed the law firm, with its name misspelled, and the words: “(From Bheki).”

Mlangeni, who was married and had a young son, took the player home Friday to listen to the cassette. When he pressed the “play” button, the right earphone exploded, police said.

Adriaan Vlok, the government’s law and order minister, said he was outraged by Mlangeni’s death, and he promised that the police would launch an investigation.

The ANC said Mlangeni and Coetzee, now a member of the ANC in exile, had exposed the activities of both the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a secret army unit that allegedly carried out surveillance and attacks on anti-apartheid leaders, and “other assassination gangs in the employ of the Pretoria government.”

The government last year said it was disbanding the Civil Cooperation Bureau, and the police have denied that hit squads operate within their ranks. More than 70 anti-apartheid activists have been assassinated here and abroad in the last 10 years, and no one has been arrested in any of those cases.

“We demand that this murderous deed be investigated with vigor and its perpetrators be brought to justice,” the ANC said in a statement.

The anti-apartheid Human Rights Commission said the sophistication of the explosive device and “the manner of setting the trap bear all the hallmarks of highly skilled and totally ruthless professional assassins. Once again we see the ugly face of apartheid.”

Mlangeni and his law firm had presented evidence last year to a commission of inquiry into hit squads, which issued a report in August concluding that no proof existed that either the army or the police were involved in political assassinations. Coetzee, then in London, had been an important witness in the inquiry, and Mlangeni had been in frequent contact with him during that time.

A statement issued Saturday by Mlangeni’s law firm said he had received an anonymous telephone call last April, a month before the bomb parcel was first sent, warning that a hit squad had been dispatched to kill Coetzee in Zambia. It was not generally known at the time that Mlangeni was in contact with Coetzee and the firm suspects wiretaps were used to obtain that information.

On Saturday, the law firm found the packing paper for the parcel bomb in Mlangeni’s office, and it said the evidence suggests that Mlangeni’s name had been placed with the return address to allay any suspicions that Coetzee might have had when he received the parcel. But when the parcel was not collected, Zambian postal authorities returned it to the Johannesburg address.