Human Rights Violation Hearings — Durban — 1996-10-24

CHAIRPERSON: After their release, both Jerry and Jeanette Curtis came and told my dad of their interrogator's particular interest in him.  They seemed to have the impression that he was at the centre of organising opposition to apartheid in Durban at that time, and that he was doing so, so craftily, that they couldn't catch him.

CHAIRPERSON: During the week after my father was killed, Leon Mellet, a crime reporter then on one of the Durban newspapers, and now a brigadier, penned several stories suggesting that my father was killed by the ANC, against

CHAIRPERSON: whom he had supposedly turned.   Details of this alleged betrayal in Mellet's articles were vague.   Leon Mellet went from crime reporting to have quite a successful career in the police, apparently he was working for them all along.

CHAIRPERSON: Was he working for them in 1978?   Who was the source of this story?   Did Leon Mellet plant it as part of a deliberate attempt to smear my father and the ANC and to throw yet another spanner in the spokes of the police investigation?

CHAIRPERSON: I would like the truth commission to question Leon Mellet about these articles and ask him to explain why he wrote them and whether or not anybody suggested that he write them.

CHAIRPERSON: In 1979 David Beeldus(?) and Arnold van der Westhuizen were caught and brought to trial for shooting at the Cape Town home of Colin Eglin.

CHAIRPERSON: It transpired that they were "Scorpio", a right-wing terrorist organisation, and the people who had made the telephone calls to us saying, "One down, two thousand to go".   During the Cape Town Supreme Court trial, letters written by  Beeldus to  Van der  Westhuizen  were  shown as evidence.    One of the letters made mention of my father's murder and the new elimination squads, which would be active in the future, according to Beeldus.

CHAIRPERSON: During their incarceration, Beeldus and Van der Westhuizen fell out.  Van der Westhuizen subsequently latched on to Breight Breightenbacht, who was a fellow prisoner in Pretoria.   On his release from prison, Breightenbacht reported that Van der Westhuizen once told him that Beeldus had confessed to having murdered Richard Turner.   Van der Westhuizen subsequently confirmed this in a statement to the police, which is now in the murder docket.

CHAIRPERSON: I would like Arnold van der Westhuizen questioned and if necessary if he doesn't want to answer those questions, subpoenaed to explain this statement.

CHAIRPERSON: I met and interviewed David Beeldus in 1993, when he had already served his sentence for right-wing terrorism, and was living in Vasco in the Cape Flats, outside Cape Town.   I located him through the phone book.   He agreed to meet me.

CHAIRPERSON: He was evasive when I asked him why he had talked about elimination squads in a letter to Van der Westhuizen.   He did tell me that in the 70s he was handled by the security police, who paid him, and used him to carry out acts of intimidation and harassment against communists, leftists and anti-apartheid activists.  In other words, people like my father.

CHAIRPERSON: When I asked him what he knew about my father, he told me that he had never heard of my father until January 1978, until his murder.   Later on, however, while illustrating a point about acts of right-wing terror that he had been blamed for, Beeldus produced two scrapbooks.  In one of the scrapbooks he kept meticulously organised original press cuttings, dating from the early 70s.  There were stories in that book about my father from before February 1973 when he was banned, all the way through to the reports of harassing phone calls received by us after dad was killed in 1978.

CHAIRPERSON: The second time we met I asked David Beeldus why he kept this scrapbook on my father.   He smiled and said, "Don't think I'm some kind of psychopath who keeps scrapbooks of all his victims, my dear".

CHAIRPERSON: I would like you to ask David Beeldus why he kept those scrapbooks and where he was and what he was doing around the time my father was killed.

CHAIRPERSON: My grandmother, Jane Turner, spent a long time trying to trace dad's killer, and she had a lot of trouble talking to a man called Martin Dolinchek.   Martin Dolinchek is now in the National Intelligence Agency.

CHAIRPERSON: In 1977 he was a BOSS agent in Durban.   He interviewed dad in late 1977 and this interview was part of the BOSS security police response to my father's request to have his banning order lifted to enable him to take up a scholarship overseas.

CHAIRPERSON: After my father's death, Dolinchek was questioned about it and his firearm taken for ballistics tests.  This, as far as I can gather, was part of an internal BOSS investigation into the murder.   According to Dolinchek he had been responsible for my father's file amongst others in the last few years of my father's life.   I have twice met Dolinchek, both times by arrangement or with the consent of the ANC, to whom he turned after BOSS abandoned him in the wake of the abortive Seychelles coup.

CHAIRPERSON: I first met Dolinchek in Zambia in 1993, and there he told me about his meeting with my father in late 1977, which he had secretly tape-recorded.   Dolinchek also described to me the little old ladies who were employed to type up the transcripts of the tapes recorded during the years of surveillance of our house, and the bugging of our telephone.  He told me how his colleagues, presumably in

CHAIRPERSON: BOSS, would slash my father's car tyres and then laughed when they watched his anger at the discovery of this vandalism.

CHAIRPERSON: Dolinchek was familiar with the intimate details of our lives.   He said he didn't kill my father.   I asked him who did and he said that he believed the security police had done it.   He told me the same story when we met in June 1995.

CHAIRPERSON: I do believe that he did not kill my father, but I don't remember that he doesn't - but I don't believe that Dolinchek  doesn't remember the names of colleagues in BOSS at the time.   And that he knows nothing and has heard nothing about who killed my father.

CHAIRPERSON: According to Dolinchek, my dad was under surveillance by both BOSS and the security police, but it was only after my father's death they discovered this surveillance had been conducted by both of them without each other's knowledge and consent.    According to Dolinchek, there was some dispute over whose client my father had been and that BOSS and security police argued over who should have been keeping him under surveillance and which one of them he belonged to.

CHAIRPERSON: I would like you to ask Martin Dolinchek about the surveillance that my father was under, and why he thinks that the security police had a hand in my father's murder.

CHAIRPERSON: I want the employees and operatives of the then BOSS and security police from the regional and national bureaux in 1977 and 1978, to answer questions put to them by you, regarding my father's death.   Amongst those operatives that I and Fowzia and other friends recall my father having repeated dealings with, and who should be questioned or subpoenaed if they refuse to be questioned, are the following:

CHAIRPERSON: * Vic MacPherson, who is now a police colonel working from -in fact, he is an inspector in the police, working from John Vorster Square in Johannesburg;

CHAIRPERSON: * Andy Taylor, who is now a police colonel, and I believe on sick leave, in this area;

CHAIRPERSON: * Ignatius or Ig Coetzee, then in the security police and now retired;

CHAIRPERSON: * Louis Botha, was then a junior officer in the security police in Durban;

CHAIRPERSON: * Herman Stadler, who was then a security - who was then a senior officer in the security police and who is now on pension in or near Pretoria.  In fact, I can give you his phone number, if you like;