Amnesty Hearings — Pretoria — 1997-02-24

JUDGE MGOEPE: Now if you first wanted to establish whether there were terrorists in the house 
before you could give instructions for his elimination, doesn't that suggest that you still wanted some more 
evidence before you could regard him as a legitimate target?

UNKNOWN: No, Mr Chairman, we had already considered him and identified him as a target.  But we 
would have preferred that there were terrorists in the house so that we would be able to eliminate them also.  
That is why my instruction was not to shoot the person in the absence of terrorists.

JUDGE MGOEPE: What was the relevance of the presence of terrorists in relation to the question 
of eliminating him?

UNKNOWN: Mr Tsele, from his house planned and organised acts of terror with those terrorists.  For 
that reason we felt that we had to eliminate him because we were not able to arrest him inside 
Bophuthatswana.

JUDGE MGOEPE: The decision to eliminate him - well let me put it this way, I am not so sure 
whether you thought of eliminating him subject to finding any terrorists in his house or whether the 
decision had finally in any case been taken to eliminate him, even before you went to the house to look for 
terrorists?

UNKNOWN: No Mr Chairman, we would only have eliminated
him if we found terrorists in his house.  The intention was 
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GAUTENG: 11

UNKNOWN: to keep him alive and to allow him to continue with his activities so that at a later time we could find the
terrorists with him, and eliminate all of them together.

JUDGE MGOEPE: So had Mamasela and Bafana not acted rather prematurely in the way that they 
did, the deceased might still have been alive today, if subsequently no terrorists were to be found in his 
house at all?

UNKNOWN: That might be possible, Mr Chairman.

SISI KHAMPEPE: Mr Cronje, I probably am not with you.  What was the intention then of you, Captain 
Hechter, Mamasela, Crafford, Bafana - I mean you are talking of quite a number of people, what was the 
intention of going to Mr Tsele's house?

UNKNOWN: The intention Mr Chairman was that if we were to have found terrorists in Mr Tsele's 
house, we would have shot them.

SISI KHAMPEPE: And your intention was to shoot Mr Tsele as well?

UNKNOWN: Yes, we also would have eliminated him.

SISI KHAMPEPE: Did you believe on the reliability of the information that you had received from the 
informers, which information was later corroborated by Mr Mamasela, did you really believe in that 
information at that stage?

UNKNOWN: I did believe this information Mr Chairman, because there were on numerous occasions, 
on every previous occasion in fact, Mamasela had told the truth and we trusted our informants.  This was 
not the only case where they have provided us with information and we found that their information was 
always correct.

SISI KHAMPEPE: So you knew then that the house was used as a safe house for terrorists, you knew then 
that Mr Tsele was
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UNKNOWN: engaged in the activities which you were told by both your informants and Mr Mamasela.  What then was 
the reason for you to send Mr Mamasela and Bafana to establish information
which you already had from a number of sources?

UNKNOWN: Terrorists were not always in the house, sometimes they came to his house and 
immediately left again or simply passed through or by after they have planned an act of terror and then on 
occasion they had to return to his house.  It was never possible to determine whether terrorists were going 
to be there on a particular moment.

SISI KHAMPEPE: Was it an act of negligence to have sent Mr Mamasela and Bafana armed with AK47's 
merely to investigate whether there were terrorists in the house or not?

UNKNOWN: I sent them with the AK's so that if they were to have been noticed or found by anyone, 
they were able to defend themselves.

SISI KHAMPEPE: Why did you not proceed with the other activities that you had gone down there to do, 
why didn't you bomb the house?  I mean you had information to eliminate both Mr Tsele and to eliminate 
the use of that house which was used as a safe house.

UNKNOWN: I knew that if we eliminated Mr Tsele that particular house would not again have been 
used as a safe house.  Since the terrorists would then have known that we were informed of the use of this 
house.

JUDGE WILSON: You have told us that you trusted Mamasela to that stage.

UNKNOWN: I did trust him.

JUDGE WILSON: Did you carry on performing operations with him after this?

UNKNOWN: I did, Mr Chairman.
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JUDGE WILSON: Why, he had now proved himself to be unreliable, against your instructions he 
had killed a man, what action did you take against him?

UNKNOWN: I took no action against him.  He was a most reliable source of information and a good 
operative.  I believed that this was a mere oversight on his part to shoot the person without having followed 
my instructions.

JUDGE WILSON: A mere oversight, is that what you regarded the killing of a man as?

UNKNOWN: (Tape ends....) ...namely that he had misunderstood my instructions.  At that time I was 
unable to believe this since my instructions to him were very clear but I did indeed have to use Mamasela 
further.

JUDGE WILSON: So he ignored your instructions and then lied to you, but you went on using 
him?

UNKNOWN: Yes, Mr Chairman.

JUDGE WILSON: Thank you.

ADV DE JAGER: The purpose of the visit was not simply to eliminate or to do the elimination on that day?

UNKNOWN: No, Mr Chairman.

ADV DE JAGER: Was the intention to see whether on that particular occasion you would have been able to 
eliminate more than one of the freedom fighters and to eliminate a number of them, was that the intention?  
You've given testimony that your intention was rather to keep Tsele alive, for how long did you want to 
keep him alive?

UNKNOWN: Our information was that there were terrorists passing through his house regularly and so 
we would have waited and would have kept his house under observation until there were terrorists.

ADV DE JAGER: If you kept his house under observation, how
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UNKNOWN: far would this house have been from your station?  How quickly would you have been able to react?

UNKNOWN: It would have taken us quite some time to
react, but the terrorists normally stayed there for a day or two.

ADV DE JAGER: What was the distance of this house from Vlakplaas?

UNKNOWN: No, we did not operate from Vlakplaas.  We operated from Pretoria to Bophuthatswana, 
about 50 kilometres, or so.

ADV DE JAGER: I want to know the distance to the particular house.

UNKNOWN: Yes, to the particular house that would have been the distance about.

MOKOTEDI MPSHE: Mr Cronje, is this not a case where we have circumstances where Mr Bafana and 
Mamasela simply had no instructions and were not able to carry out any act, when in fact they should not 
have killed the person?

UNKNOWN: That is what I said, Mr Chairman.  At that time they did not have particular instructions 
to eliminate this person, it was the intention that they had to first come back to me and report back to me 
with regard to what they had found at the house.

SISI KHAMPEPE: Just a further point Mr Cronje, if they had come back and reported to you that there were 
no terrorists, what would you have done?

UNKNOWN: In that case we would have driven back to Pretoria without having done anything to 
Tsele.

SISI KHAMPEPE: After having come all the way from Pretoria in order to ascertain that kind of 
information, you are talking of senior policemen who were part of this operation
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GAUTENG: 14

UNKNOWN: merely to investigate and assess whether there were terrorists in that house?  Is that what you want us to 
believe?