Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — 1997-11-19

MR BOOYENS: And are you saying that he must have identified the bodies, because you would have expected him as the man in charge of the Security Branch, Anti-Terrorist Desk to know who they are?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: They were his suspects.  He had to know, you had to know your suspects.

MR BOOYENS: Yes.  You are assuming that he had known these suspects and would have been able to identify them?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: He identified them as people he knew.

MR BOOYENS: No, he identified maybe one of them as a person he knew, according to you.

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: That is why I said, Mr Chairman, I am not quite sure how many bodies or how many people he identified.

MR BOOYENS: By the way, while we are talking about it, did you also identify some of the bodies?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: Yes.

MR BOOYENS: Subsequently at the morgue?  Is that correct?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: No.

MR BOOYENS: There?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: On the scene.

MR BOOYENS: Okay.  Did you identify all of them?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: Not all of them.

MR BOOYENS: How many did you identify?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I identified two.

MR BOOYENS: These two that you identified were they people that were involved in this group of people that you met earlier on when you infiltrated?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: That is correct.

MR BOOYENS: Subsequently, you were not involved in identification again?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: No, because I did not know the rest of the other people.

MR BOOYENS: Can you remember which two you identified?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: Yes, I remember I identified Jabu and Chris.

MR BOOYENS: Okay, sorry, they were shot where?  I think, I have only got the surnames here.  So, ...

CHAIRPERSON: Chris was ... (intervention).

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: ED.

CHAIRPERSON: Jabu ...

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: C, B.

MR BOOYENS: At CB and Chris was at DE, thank you.
	If the Commission would just bear with me, Mr Chairman.
	Would it be, there is, a lot of questions has been asked about the possibility to arrest people and so on.  Did you work in Crossroads, KTC on occasion, infiltrations?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I just went, no, not KTC.  I just went once, that is when I went to this group.

MR BOOYENS: I see, but when you went in with the policeman, in other words, went in as a policeman, not as an infiltration, did you ever go with Mr Bellingan ... (intervention).

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: No.

MR BOOYENS: ... and company.

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I have never went with them inside the townships.  They were doing it with these local Murder and Robbery Unit guys and the local security guy.  We were not even meeting the local police people ... (intervention).

MR BOOYENS: I see.

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: ... because we were working underground.

MR BOOYENS: Okay, oh, so you were undercover agents?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: That is right.

MR BOOYENS: But, to your knowledge, attempts were made to go into these areas to arrest people and so on.  Is that correct?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I was never told about such attempts.  I do not know anything about them.

MR BOOYENS: Thank you, Mr Chairman, I have got no further questions.
NO FURTHER QUESTIONS BY MR BOOYENS

MR HUGO: We have no questions, Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Williams.
CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MR B WILLIAMS

UNKNOWN: Thank you, Mr Chairperson.
	Mr Mbelo, just to deal with one of the last questions raised by my colleague first. The question of the, where the arms would be stashed and the question of whether or not the police had any prior knowledge of this.  You do not have any prior knowledge of that?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I do not have any prior knowledge of the arms or where they could have been stashed.

UNKNOWN: Is it correct that the arms which had been found were found in a position relative to where Captain Bellingan and Sergeant Grobbelaar were, in fact, in NY3?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: Yes, according to the inspection in loco it was, the case is just like that.

UNKNOWN: And the arms stashed as they were, those were the only stashed arms that were found?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: It was the only stashed arms.

UNKNOWN: I want to deal now, I will come back to those issues again, I want to deal specifically with your application and, perhaps, you can help the Committee by saying what it was that motivated you to join the police in the first instance.

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I joined the police in 1981, since in 1980 there were some unrests at our high school or at our place.  So, my mum was work, was a domestic worker working for White people, so I had, I needed some income, so I scouted for work.  I applied for many firms, the police were the only people who answered my application before the rest could have answered.

UNKNOWN: I see and you say that at the time that you were at school, specifically in 1980, there was unrest in the area where you went to school?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: That is positive.

UNKNOWN: Were you, at that stage, aware of the suppression of that unrest by the police inflicted upon school pupils?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: At that stage I was not aware of any politics or I was not politically inclined or political minded, because I came from a small place where my family does not believe in politics, because I did not have a father, only my mother, alone self, politics were never discussed at home.

UNKNOWN: Is there any particular reason why you decided to join the Security Police at such an early stage in your career?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: The particular reason is for me, was to earn money and to help my mum, because my mum is a person who is an asthma, she is an asthma patient.

UNKNOWN: Was joining the Security Police going to involve you earning more money?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: No, joining the Security Police was not going to give me more money, because at that stage I did not know the works of the Security Police even at, Hammanskraal I just heard that Security Police are just, they are people who go along with their own, they go to work with police cars and they do not have to wear uniforms and they are always in private.

UNKNOWN: I come back to my prior question, then, what is the reason for you joining the Security Police?  Why not then join the ordinary police?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: I cannot say, I joined the Security Police, because I thought it as a challenge, because for my, since I joined the police force in 1981, March, up to November, I was doing actually charge office work, so I wanted to change or try to work at another space and when I was recruited I did not know where I was being taken to.  I thought that I was going to work at police headquarters in Pretoria.  That is why I joined it in Hammanskraal.

UNKNOWN: And do I understand you to be saying now that you were not actually aware that you were going to be joining the Security Police?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: No, I mean I was not aware that I was going to join Vlakplaas.  I thought that I was going to join headquarters, Security Branch.

UNKNOWN: In the first year that you joined Vlakplaas, can you give the Committee some sort of indication of the kind of things that you did there?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: In my first year there was nothing, actually, going on, because we were new recruits, we had to be taught the trade of the job.  So, most of the things which we did, we were guarding the farm while the other guys are going out.  Even before my first assignment to go and patrol the Western Transvaal Border.

UNKNOWN: Now, would you tell us a little bit about your assignment to patrol the Western Transvaal Border?  What did that involve?

TIKAPELA JOHANNES MBELO: We were patrolling the borders and we were moving around the villages.  Our askaris were helping us out to point out their comrades or the people with whom they were trained with outside.  That was our main task.