Hunting the Seven: How the Gugulethu Seven assassins were exposed

By Beverley Roos-Muller

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were part of a 'terrorist' MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and a second inquest in 1989 that again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock's Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having planned and executed the cold-blooded killings. Yet their real agenda remained a mystery.
In Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case and her search for the truth of their deaths that has been shrouded in lies and mystery. Sifting through the evidence, and interviewing many of those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas's only operation in the Western Cape and behind it lay a shocking secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: May 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781776193516

Beverley Roos-Muller

DR BEVERLEY ROOS-MULLER is a veteran journalist and broadcaster, and former academic lecturing in humanities at the University of Cape Town. She was an anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s, including being a spokesperson for the multi-organisational Open City campaign opposing the Group Areas Act. She is the co-author, with her late husband, Prof Ampie Muller, of Vuur in Sy Vingers about his father-in-law, the poet NP Van Wyk Louw.

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9780624089810_FC

BEVERLEY ROOS-MULLER

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

For Nandi and Kieran

‘I will tell you news of your son …

Truth will come to light. Murder cannot be hid long …

In the end, truth will out.’

William Shakespeare

PEOPLE INVOLVED

THE GUGULETHU SEVEN

Christopher Piet, 25

Jabulani Godfrey Miya¹, 23

Zabonke John Konile, 28

Mandla Simon Mxinwa, 23

Themba Mlifi, 30

Zola Alfred Swelani, 22

Zandisile ‘Sammi’ Mjobo, 22

THE MOTHERS

Cynthia Nomvuyo Ngewu (mother of Christopher Piet)

Eunice Thembiso Miya

Elsie Konile

Irene Mxinwa

Maggie Mbambo (mother of Themba Mlifi)

Edith Mjobo

THE CAPE POLICEMEN

Major (later Colonel) Cornelius Adolf Janse ‘Dolf’ Odendal

Lieutenant William R Liebenberg

Warrant Officer Hendrik ‘Barrie’ ‘Rambo’ Barnard

Major Stephanus Jacobus Johannes Brits

Sergeant André Grobbelaar

Captain (later Major) Johan Kleyn

Captain Leonard Knipe

Warrant Officer (later Sergeant) Geoffrey Roland McMaster

Sergeant John Martin Sterrenberg

Major Kat Coetzee

Inspector Kallie Bothma

Colonel Quintin Visser

VLAKPLAAS POLICE (PRETORIA)

Sergeant Wilhelm Riaan ‘Balletjies’ Bellingan

Constable Tikapela ‘Thapelo’ Johannes Mbelo

Askari Xola Frank ‘Jimmy’ Mbane

THE POLITICIANS

Tian van der Merwe

Helen Suzman

Louis le Grange

Adriaan Vlok

THE WITNESSES

Bowers Vumazonke, cleaner in the Dairy Belle hostel

Cecil Msutu, employee of Dairy Belle

General Sibaca, employee of Dairy Belle

THE JOURNALISTS

Chris Bateman

Tony Weaver

Tony Heard

THE LAWYERS AND FORENSIC SPECIALISTS

Jeremy Gauntlett SC KC

Gordon Rushton, Att.

Selwyn Shrock, State Prosecutor

Dr Johan van der Spuy, head of Groote Schuur trauma unit

Dr David Klatzow, forensic scientist and ballistics specialist

PROLOGUE

Seldom have seven young men been so hunted by so many.

First, assassins hunted them to their deaths.

Then, two news reporters who viewed the gruesome crime scene and its aftermath, troubled by the stark inconsistencies in the police account, hunted to establish what had actually happened.

When these reporters were charged for reporting the facts, their lawyers and forensic specialists hunted for evidence of what had really occurred on that terrible, murderous morning.

Ten years later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was still hunting for the truth about what happened to those seven young men, pressuring the police perpetrators into disclosing their dark and hidden secrets.

I, too, hunted the Gugulethu Seven for years, after meeting some of their families in bereaved shock, witnessing the funerals and attending the hearings, trying to catch the drifting ghost of truth within the fog of denials and lies.

How does one grasp such depravity?

By hunting it.

PART ONE

THE KILLINGS

3 MARCH 1986

1

EARLY ONE MORNING …

The sky was clear and calm on that late-summer morning. The leaves on the giant bluegum trees barely fluttered as they loomed over the main intersection at the entrance of the dusty township of Gugulethu.

It was 7.20 am and the surrounding dirt streets were quiet. Those with jobs in this 62 000-strong black township had already left for work much earlier, walking through the dawning light to the railway station to reach their destinations in the affluent business centres and suburbs closer to the striking cut-out silhouette of Table Mountain, about fifteen kilometres distant – so near, yet so far.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion, terrifying those nearby. Those still at home feared an apocalypse had arrived, so great was the volume of sound as the shots and ratta-tat-tatting streamed on. They crouched low, for experience had taught them that thin corrugated-iron walls did not stop bullets.

The terrifying salvo of shooting ceased, replaced immediately by yelling, running, engines roaring. Then more gunfire. Some single shots.

In a few minutes, it was over.

Seven bodies lay scattered across the dry ground.

The lifeless bodies were not all grouped together. Four lay close to a pair of almost identical white vans at the intersection of the NY1, the main road leading into the shabby township. The other three dead men lay at a distance: one on the dry scrubby veld in front of a facebrick hostel, two others hidden in the bushes further away – they had been running for their lives.

Baffled and traumatised onlookers gathered, but were forced back by another oddity in this bizarre scene – a very senior police presence, with many heavy vehicles in this normally underpoliced township.

Police shootings were frequent in Cape Town’s townships, but this was unprecedented: large, violent, very public.

After the police had swept away the pools of blood in the street, after the bodies had been filmed, and manhandled, and hauled away to the indifferent attentions of the state mortuary in Salt River, a stunned crowd formed while helicopter blades clattered overhead.

Later that morning, the press began to arrive. Some of them were welcomed: they were from pliable news sources sympathetic to the apartheid government, and could be relied on to quickly feed out the official version – that seven heavily armed young black men had been planning to ambush a police van arriving at a nearby police station. Others were not welcome, and were coldly eyeballed.

Tame radio stations began, later that morning, to carry a puzzling story about several communists or Russians or terrorists – this interchangeable mix was commonplace – shot dead in a fierce gun battle with the police, who had apparently foiled a dangerous urban ambush. Some families of the victims heard this sensational story but ignored it, not imagining that it was their own who were affected. They had no reason to.

Were there any witnesses? There were, despite careful precautions. The police contingent had had the advantage of an empty, morning-quiet street in Gugs, as the township is known: the timing was well chosen. But for those in power, that mattered very little: any possible witnesses were black. Crudely put, this meant they could be intimidated, threatened, even arrested under the statutes governing police action. They could be disappeared. They had no voting rights; they had no rights at all, in any meaningful sense of the word. Few in positions of influence would believe their word against any white official’s.

In any case, the apparent circumstances of this high-profile event were entirely suspicious and dangerous: what were seven heavily armed young black men doing there that morning, other than planning to ambush a police van? What a persuasive narrative this was.

2

A TROUBLED REPORTER

Chris Bateman, a 29-year-old crime reporter for the progressive morning newspaper the Cape Times, was dawdling in the police headquarters in Parade Street in the city centre around 9 am, waiting for the usual well-scrubbed daily police briefing. Then he realised that none of his other newspaper colleagues were present, nor were the familiar police faces to be seen.

He suspected immediately that he was missing out on something big.

As he was wandering around the deserted offices, the telephone rang on the desk of Lieutenant Attie Laubscher, the police public relations officer whom Bateman knew as one of the more approachable and cooperative police officers. No one else was there, so he picked it up. It was Charl Pauw, a television reporter for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), who asked him if he had heard about the shootout in Gugulethu.

Now Bateman knew why the building was empty: there was ‘big kak in Gugulethu’.¹

The journalist, who was of medium height and stocky build, with a round, fair beard and a slightly dishevelled look, quickly requested a Cape Times staff car and a photographer, Obed Zilwa, and rushed to the scene in Gugulethu. They arrived shortly before midday to find the intersection cordoned off, a large police presence and an irate though restrained crowd of local bystanders. Some policemen were throwing sandy soil on pools of blood near a large roadside bluegum tree, next to which was parked an army Casspir troop carrier. Chalk marks on the tarmac encircled bullet cartridges.

Some of Cape Town’s most senior police brass – including the retired police commissioner Brigadier Chris Swart and Brigadier M van Staden – who had rapidly arrived after the shootings, were being ushered through the dramatic scene.² Major Dolf Odendal of the Anti-Riot squad, known and unloved in the townships, had been spotted.

At least seven armoured personnel carriers now sealed off the area of the shooting, and roadblocks had already been set up, while police vehicles could be seen stationed on the highway nearby.

None of this made sense to Bateman’s observant eye, for this township, like so many others in South Africa, was underpoliced; little attention was given to them, other than by Anti-Riot squads during unrest. Such a big show of police seniority was utterly out of the ordinary.

Bateman approached the PRO, Attie Laubscher, who brushed him off: ‘Chris, ek kan nie met jou praat nie! Jy moet Pretoria bel.’ (Chris, I can’t speak to you! You must phone Pretoria.)

This was an oddly guarded statement, Bateman thought; why would Pretoria headquarters have to be contacted about a local shooting in the Cape? He tried to cajole Laubscher, who remained adamant he could not say anything.

Despite the PRO’s reluctance, some reporters who were trusted by the police were indeed being briefed. Those were the first reports to hit the news, fed to the government-controlled SABC radio newscasts.

Bateman realised he was getting nowhere; he needed to find another way into this story. He focused on the nearest and most prominent building in the immediate area, the two-storey Dairy Belle hostel. Built to accommodate that company’s workers, the hostel usefully had windows looking directly onto both the intersecting streets – the NY1 and NY111³ – where the shootings had happened.

Fortuitously, Bateman had grown up at a trading station in KwaZulu-Natal where many of his childhood friends were Zulu, so he was a fluent speaker; this meant he could also understand Xhosa, a closely related language more commonly used in the Cape, particularly in Gugulethu. This skill would prove vital to the breaking story and its eventual unravelling.

Slipping in through the back door of the hostel, he spoke first to Bowers Vumazonke, a 28-year-old cleaner, who readily told him of a shootout by the police aimed at a small group of black men. He had heard a big bang, he told Bateman, and, looking out of the window, had seen a man lying under the big tree at the intersection. He had run out onto the street and then saw that same man being shot in the head by a policeman. There had been two more bodies lying nearby.⁴

Bateman then went upstairs and spoke to 60-year-old Cecil Msutu, who had been employed by Dairy Belle for 23 years. He described having first heard a loud explosive noise (later said to have been a hand grenade going off), followed by fierce gunfire. One combatant had collapsed near a large bluegum tree, and a policeman had walked up to him and ‘finished him off’, shooting him in the head. Another man had emerged from the bushes – the non-indigenous wattle and Port Jackson acacias that had swallowed up much of the Cape Flats – with his hands above his head. A policeman had approached him, kneed him, and turned to another policeman for some kind of confirmation; Msutu had clearly heard a white officer shout, ‘Skiet hom!’ (Shoot him!) and had seen the policeman turn back and fire two shots at virtual point-blank range at the victim’s head. Msutu showed Bateman a bullet hole in the hostel window: at the height of the gun fight, this witness had spent some time ducking below the windowsill.

His third witness, 39-year-old hostel dweller General Sibaca, told Bateman that he had seen a man near the bushes on the far side of the road. A policeman had walked up to him, confronted him, kneed and kicked him; then he had turned back and shot him at virtual point-blank range.⁵

Bateman said later, ‘I remember thinking it was too much of a coincidence: the witnesses being at different places, hardly knowing each other, yet their stories being so alike. And I remember saying to them [in Xhosa], This is a serious allegation. You realise what you are saying? What you are saying has great implications. But they were adamant that, in fact, that is what had happened.’⁶

Bateman jotted down this information in his small green-covered notebook, and quickly sketched a plan of the hostel, marking where the witnesses had been, as well as the bullet holes inside. Armed with so much incendiary information, he concluded that if his instincts were right, he was sitting on an explosive news story that needed to be handled very gingerly.

Chris Bateman’s swift drawing in his reporter’s notebook of the Dairy Belle hostel at the scene of the killings: the top strip marked ‘Rd’ (road) is the NY1, the main road leading directly into Gugulethu.

On news-desk duty that day was Tony Weaver, an experienced reporter who had faced plenty of dangerous conditions. When Chris Bateman called him and said, ‘This thing stinks’, Weaver was perfectly positioned to understand. ‘His reporting that day was extraordinary,’ he says of Bateman, who is a modest man, and wouldn’t say it of himself.⁷

Weaver admits that up until that time he wasn’t completely sure of Bateman. Neither of them had worked at the prestigious long-running newspaper for long: Bateman had joined in 1983, as a specialist crime reporter from the smaller Natal Witness, while Weaver had returned from a difficult stint in war-torn Namibia just a few months before. Politically connected journalists like Weaver were always watchful of crime reporters, who were inclined to become too close to the police.⁸ But it quickly became clear to Weaver that Bateman was of a different cut.

At 30, Weaver was tall, dark and rangy, with a self-possessed air – a man who could handle himself. Their personalities and appearances may have been quite dissimilar, but Bateman and Weaver were devoted to the same goals: to pursue the story fearlessly and accurately, and not to be intimidated into pulling back, as so many of their more prudent-minded colleagues had done to appease the authorities, and avoid potential charges about how they covered police action. These two reporters knew that their coverage differing from the official version would mean they would both come under serious pressure in the coming months – and that pressure certainly came, carrying a heavy clout.

Bateman made his way back to the office, usefully located in the city centre just a block away from St George’s Cathedral. Weaver, meanwhile, began to field calls from overseas news organisations, most insistently the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had picked up the early police version put out by compliant media sources: that a brave band of policemen had foiled an ambush on a van ferrying policemen into Gugulethu. All seven of the terrorists had been quickly killed during a very dangerous gun battle, yet all the police had been spared. This was, the story went, a triumph of intelligence work and anti-terrorist training, highlighting the police capacity to secure the country.

Still: all seven suspects swiftly killed, stone dead, in a chaotic shootout on wide-open ground, with no injuries to others at all? This all seemed more than just lucky – and in a country riven by apartheid violence, very few who were politically acute were inclined to believe such self-serving miracles.

Weaver was a main point of contact for a host of major overseas news sources, including The Times and The Guardian in the United Kingdom (UK), The New York Times and The Washington Post; he had wide experience in international news reporting, having also been a correspondent for The National, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC’s) flagship news programme. For now, though, he gave out little information, confirming only what was already available – he felt protective of the Cape Times scoop under the byline of Bateman, who had done the first critical legwork.

They both knew, however, that time was of the essence. The moment the authorities knew about Bateman’s very different version, which challenged the kernel of their own, it would likely be banned under the provisions of the weighty and censorious Police Act.⁹ Far too many important stories had already been extinguished from public view using this method.

3

THE LAUGHING POLICEMEN

Reluctant to hang around the newspaper office waiting for Pretoria police headquarters to deliver some useful material about the dramatic story, Chris Bateman decided to follow up a lead: he had word that some of the policemen who had taken part in that morning’s shootings were ‘available’.

He and photographer Ivor Markman drove to the headquarters of the Murder and Robbery squad in Bishop Lavis, out on the Cape Flats, where they were regaled by some of the excited police who had been involved in the shootings.

Captain Johan Kleyn, who had thick brown hair and a moustache, and was casually dressed in a spotless light-coloured shirt with short sleeves, had been at the very heart of the gun battle. In excellent shape after his ordeal, he proudly showed Bateman a small array of ‘guerrilla weaponry’ spread across a tabletop, behind which he and some of his colleagues posed for the cameras: a few pieces of grenade, an AK-47 assault rifle, a Tokarev pistol and two revolvers (a .38 and a .45). There were also bullets, and a pin Kleyn claimed to have retrieved from an exploded grenade.¹ When asked whether this was the entire weaponry of the ‘terrorists’ collected from the scene, Kleyn replied ‘Yes’ clearly, and was recorded doing so.

Johan Kleyn, Kat Coetzee and Kallie Bothma with weaponry allegedly used by the Seven. Photograph: Ivor Markman.

This act of hubris – or perhaps naivety – in the post-event flush of adrenaline was one of several early mistakes, for Markman’s photographs had now recorded for posterity this quite paltry haul. It turned out to be completely at odds with later, police-issued photographs displaying a much larger, more menacing collection of weaponry, including AK-47s wrapped in a distinctive traditional blanket recovered from the scene.

The animated policemen gave their version of events, recalled Bateman, drily. ‘They said they had received a tipoff that a police van, carrying change-over shift staff to the Gugulethu police station, would be attacked early that morning, and that they had set a counter-ambush. I deliberately avoided confronting them with my eyewitness versions, as it would have immediately compromised my informants.’²

While photographing this evidence, Markman was struck by how self-congratulatory these police officers seemed: ‘It was so chilling to see them laughing; they were so proud of what they had just done … it was just one big joke.’³

This visit to Bishop Lavis resulted in more questions for Bateman than answers. The overly propagandistic response by the police, with the array of so-called Russian weapons displayed, and their bragging comments about having bagged ‘terrorists’, gave him pause. While he knew there were some AK-47s in the townships, those bits of Russian grenade and the Tokarev pistol that the police had displayed, as well as the total lack of any similarly large ‘terrorist’ incidents in the Cape, added to his suspicions.

Bateman voiced his concern by asking Captain Jan Calitz, the senior Western Cape police PRO widely believed to be a functionary of the securocrats – those shadowy figures in the state security cluster who controlled the police and the military, including politicians, generals and high-ranking civil servants – why Murder and Robbery detectives were involved if it was an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. His was a reasonable query, given that such an anti-terrorism unit existed for this express purpose. Calitz’s aggressive, snapped response was curious: why did Bateman think that these men could not combat terrorism? Calitz then admonished the surprised journalist for not supporting the police actions: ‘Kry jouself ’n ruggraat, man!’ (Grow a backbone, man!)⁴

At the Cape Times editorial conference that evening, the editor, Tony Heard, subjected Bateman and Weaver to a tight interrogation, repeatedly questioning the account they had put before him. Shortish, and youthful-looking in his late 40s, Heard had been one of the youngest editors to lead a major – and, at that time, prestigious – South African newspaper when he was appointed to the Cape Times editorship fifteen years earlier, a paper he had cut his teeth on as a junior reporter. His father, the esteemed veteran journalist George Heard,⁵ had once worked there too.

Bateman was convinced of the accuracy of his hostel witnesses, and after due consideration, Heard did what good editors should do, though often enough do not: he decided to trust his reporters and run with their story. This was by no means a decision taken lightly. Heard, a sturdy editor who refused to pander to government pressure, was, however, used to making controversial decisions that his publishers, the owners and management of his newspaper, did not like. They had labelled him – not without reason – as ‘left inclined’. But his personal leadership and principles gave his reporters the confidence to push boundaries that other newspapers simply would not dare challenge.

Having decided to run Bateman’s story, the paper now had to work out a practical way around the restrictive laws involved.

As was required under media regulations, Bateman included the official police account of the ‘attempted ambush’ in his news reports for the next morning. This claim was that acting on a tipoff, the police had intercepted the Gugulethu Seven⁶ around 7.20 am, when a detective – Captain Kleyn – approached the group on foot with his sidearm drawn, after which one of the suspects threw a hand grenade which had a four-and-a-half-second delay (an unusually fine detail), enabling an athletic feat in which Kleyn dived for cover, firing, while the police car from which he had emerged was able