Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — 2000-06-13

UNKNOWN: Your Mr Verster et al, would have supported the idea of selecting a target for assassination, people involved in military activities inside the country against the State, people exploding bombs for instance.

MR WESSELS: With respect Mr Chairman, the evidence of Mr Verster wasn't as put by my learned friend to the witness, the evidence of Mr Verster, but it would depend on the circumstances, you wouldn't always kill a person, you might take other measures in certain circumstances and the way it is framed it's as if Mr Verster said always people like that would be eliminated.  It gives an incorrect complexion on the matter.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, thank you.
	Mr van Zyl, would you yourself and would you have thought that Mr Verster, Mr Burger and the others who attended, would have thought that the actual people who were members of the Kewtown group would have been legitimate targets for an attack?

MR VAN ZYL: Yes.

UNKNOWN: Thank you.  Now tell me, I'm just trying to work out whether the plan was, and I'm going to give you three possibilities here, whether it was merely to give the people who were attending these meetings a fright?  That's the one possibility.  The second, whether it was to destroy the whole building?	  The third was whether it was only to destroy a part of the building?

MR VAN ZYL: I would say it was a combination of two and three.

UNKNOWN: I'm a bit confused, either you wanted to destroy the whole building or part or are you saying you wanted to destroy most of the building?

MR VAN ZYL: Yes, the hall in which the meetings were always held, that was the objective thereof.  And if one had a look at it, the explosives that were supplied could impossibly have, in my opinion, destroyed the whole building because then they would have given me a box full of explosives.  So it was done to destroy the hall where the people met.

UNKNOWN: Yes, because you'll agree with me the building is much bigger than just the hall.

MR VAN ZYL: It is so.

UNKNOWN: So I take it that the object was to destroy the hall, not the building.

MR VAN ZYL: Yes.

UNKNOWN: And I take it that you're saying it wasn't just to give people a fright, but it was to in fact destroy the hall.

MR VAN ZYL: And to send them a message.

UNKNOWN: But you'll agree with me you can give people a fright by exploding a small explosive or a thunder flash, without using the kind of explosives that would destroy a hall?

MR VAN ZYL: Yes.

UNKNOWN: Now you and the CCB had access to the best technical equipment and advice on the use of explosives, correct?  Well amongst the best.

MR VAN ZYL: Yes, we had access.

UNKNOWN: Now I'm assuming on your version you're saying in the first place you didn't want to harm people.

MR VAN ZYL: That is so.

UNKNOWN: In the second place, that neither you nor co-operatives wanted to be arrested.

MR VAN ZYL: That is so.

UNKNOWN: Now at the meeting, did you discuss why you were going to use a limpet mine as opposed to any other form of explosives?

MR VAN ZYL: The reason therefore was that because of the information that we received the persons who used the hall were allegedly involved in acts of terror where limpet mines were used, and that is why we decided to use a similar mine.

UNKNOWN: Was it because of the symbolic nature of the limpet mine?  Is that what you're saying?

MR VAN ZYL: Because of the reasons that I have just explained to you now.

UNKNOWN: But you see, am I understanding you correctly, you're saying because they used limpet mines, therefore we're going to use limpet mines because we want to send out a particular message?

MR VAN ZYL: No, if you can recall I said that after the explosion we expected the police to arrive at the scene, they would make a finding that a limpet mine was used and if they investigate the matter properly we hoped that they would draw the inference and said that the persons who gathered in the hall, it was their own limpet mine that was detonated.

UNKNOWN: Now given your objective of not wanting to harm people, I assume that at your in-house you discussed the size of limpet mine that you were going to use, how many kilograms of explosives, whether you were going to use a mini limpet mine or some other kind of limpet mine.

MR VAN ZYL: That is so.

UNKNOWN: And what was discussed and who said what?

MR VAN ZYL: A proposal was made that we should use a large limpet mine.

UNKNOWN: Not a mini limpet mine?

MR VAN ZYL: I think it was a large limpet mine.

UNKNOWN: Who proposed this?

MR VAN ZYL: It could have been me, it could have been the Co-ordinator, I can really not remember.

UNKNOWN: But you don't really know anything about limpet mines.

MR VAN ZYL: No.

UNKNOWN: So you wouldn't have proposed it.

MR VAN ZYL: No, but I know the difference between the two, what they look like.

UNKNOWN: Did you attend an explosives course while you were in the South African Police, bomb course?

MR VAN ZYL: No, I did not.

UNKNOWN: Did you discuss the original of manufacture of the limpet mine?  In other words, whether it should be from the Eastern Bloc or from somewhere else.

MR VAN ZYL: Not that I can recall.

UNKNOWN: Did you discuss whether you should use only one limpet mine or more than one limpet mine?

MR VAN ZYL: It could have been discussed.

UNKNOWN: You can't remember.

MR VAN ZYL: I can't recall.

UNKNOWN: Do you know that a limpet mine is an anti-personnel mine?

MR VAN ZYL: My understanding of a anti-personnel mine is something that is placed in footpaths to kill foot-soldiers, a limpet mine is something that is used to destroy buildings and structures.

UNKNOWN: Mini limpet mines?

MR VAN ZYL: Mini limpet also for that matter.

UNKNOWN: At the in-house did you discuss what time of the day or night the explosion should occur?

MR VAN ZYL: We discuss that it should be approximately 9 o'clock in the evening because at that stage the meeting with which information on, would be over by then.

UNKNOWN: Did you discuss - now assuming you don't want to injure anyone and you don't want to get caught, whether it might not make more sense to set the mine to go off in the early hours of the morning?  You could set the limpet on a fuse and you could be far away from the scene at the time that the limpet exploded.  Was that discussed?

MR VAN ZYL: We did discuss that and it was found that a remote control mechanism would be a far safer mechanism because the fuse mechanism that you are referring to is very unreliable and in that process could lead to injuries to other innocent people.

UNKNOWN: Mr van Zyl, my instructions in this regard are that these fuses are not accurate in the sense that you can set them to a limpet mine going off at an exact time in the sense that there's a margin of error, but that certainly if you wanted to blow up an empty hall at 3 o'clock in the morning, that fuse is more than accurate enough for that purpose.

MR VAN ZYL: It may be.

UNKNOWN: Well assuming that to be so, can you explain why you didn't decide to use a limpet with a fuse, blowing up the hall at 3 o'clock in the morning?  In circumstances where you could have been at the airport at the time that the explosion occurred.

MR VAN ZYL: It was important to us to ensure that no people were injured or killed in that explosion, and in the light of these circumstances, it was safer for us to use a remote control mechanism than to make use of a limpet mine that would have to be planted and that would detonate in its own time.  It's a simple as that.

UNKNOWN: Alright, I'm coming back to that later.  Can you tell me, given that your object was to merely cause structural damage to the building, why did you want to place the limpet inside the building, as opposed to against an exterior wall?

MR VAN ZYL: Once again it is the case that we wanted to use the exact hall, we wanted to destroy the exact hall that would have been used that evening by the people mentioned in my statement.