South Africa to Arrest Leader of Death Squad

Police said Wednesday that they are arresting a former secret police death-squad leader, who became the country’s best-known whistle-blower on atrocities of the apartheid regime, and four other former security officers in the 1981 murder of a prominent human rights lawyer.

Plans to prosecute former hit-squad commander Dirk Coetzee, whose secret police unit allegedly killed attorney Griffiths Mxenge of Durban 15 years ago, came as a surprise: In 1989, Coetzee publicly confessed his role in the brutal slaying and other assassinations and became the first ranking insider to expose the former government’s “dirty war” against its foes at home and abroad.

“I’m extremely bitter,” Coetzee said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “People who kept their mouths shut got golden handshakes or are still in uniform. And I’m being persecuted for telling the truth.”

But Fumbatha Mxenge said he is “delighted” that his brother’s murder may finally be tried. Mxenge called it “inhuman” to expect him to forgive those who stabbed his brother 46 times, cut his throat and mutilated his body.

“I’m not impressed with the argument that Dirk Coetzee has been elevated to the status of a folk hero,” Mxenge said by phone from his home in Port Elizabeth. “People have forgotten that he was a brutal killer. We’re very happy that he’s finally going to face the music.”

Coetzee was vilified by apartheid officials after his allegations of covert police abuses were first publicized. He fled the country in 1989 to join the then-banned African National Congress and survived an assassination attempt in 1990 that left his lawyer dead. After the anti-apartheid ANC was elected to power in 1994, he became an operative for the National Intelligence Agency.

In March, Coetzee became the first former security police officer to apply for amnesty from the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is investigating apartheid-era abuses. He said he submitted a document detailing his role in 27 crimes, including the slaying of Mxenge and five other murders.

“I was the first to document all my atrocities,” he said.

Coetzee said his arrest, which is planned for Friday, “almost certainly” will keep other security police from seeking amnesty for politically motivated crimes. But Alex Boraine, deputy head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told reporters that he does not believe Coetzee’s case will dissuade others from confessing.

“The fact the courts are serious may encourage many perpetrators to apply for amnesty,” Boraine said. “If the alternative is being taken to court and prosecuted, it helps concentrate the mind.”

Boraine said Coetzee’s lawyers could apply for postponement of his trial pending the outcome of his application for amnesty. Mxenge’s family has filed suit in the country’s Constitutional Court to block the amnesty hearings, but the court has not ruled.

Police Director Bushie Engelbrecht said by phone that all five suspects were to be arrested this week. The first, former security police officer Andy Taylor, appeared in court in Durban early Wednesday and was released on $250 bail. Another officer, Almond Nofemela, is already serving a life sentence in prison for murder.

The case is the third high-profile prosecution launched by President Nelson Mandela’s government against senior security officials of the former government.

Former police Col. Eugene de Kock, who succeeded Coetzee as head of the Vlakplaas police unit, has been on trial in Pretoria since early last year on 121 counts of murder, fraud and other charges. Coetzee has appeared as a prosecution witness in the case.

A separate murder trial of former Defense Minister Magnus Malan and 20 others, including 10 top-ranking military and intelligence officials from the apartheid era, began in Durban in March.

Prosecutors have charged the group with authorizing an “offensive paramilitary force” that shot and killed 13 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children, as they slept in a rural Zulu township in January 1987. Malan and the others have pleaded not guilty.