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

CHAIRPERSON: I jumped out of my bed and went to help dad.   Neither Kim nor I saw or heard anyone or any vehicles outside in the driveway.   Whoever fired the shot was standing on the enclosed stoep directly outside the window.   The bullet nicked or ricocheted off the burglar bars on the window, and hit my father at very close range.  The bullet apparently came from a 9mm pistol.   He was standing holding the curtain and the bullet would have come through here, through the top of his arm, through both lungs, and out underneath this arm.  It pierced both his lungs, passed straight through his body, and retained enough velocity to hit the wall several metres behind him, and then to ricocheted across the room before landing on my bed.

CHAIRPERSON: My father fell on the floor, screaming and writhing in pain, but he managed to get up and to run through the house towards the back door.   He may have lost consciousness while he was running, because he hit the wall and then collapsed face down on the floor in the archway between the livingroom and the kitchen.

CHAIRPERSON: I ran past him to the back door and shouted for help to Cathy Thompson, who was an American journalist.  Cathy died a few years ago of cancer, but then she rented the cottage in our garden with fellow-journalist Dick Usher.  Dick was away in Johannesburg that night.

CHAIRPERSON: I screamed, "Cathy, come quickly, there has been a bomb".   Cathy came up to the house only minutes later, but in the meantime I tried to summon help by dialling the police.   For at least five minutes, though it seemed very very much more, neither I nor Cathy could get a dialling tone, the phone line was apparently dead.    After a while, and I don't really know how long a while it was, because it seemed like hours, but it was probably only 10 or 15 minutes, Cathy did manage to dial out.  For some reason, the telephone started working again.   She called the police and the ambulance, who arrived at least half an hour after my father was shot, but I am not sure of the time.

CHAIRPERSON: When they arrived he was already dead.   He died probably 20 minutes after he was hit.   I had tried during those 20 minutes to talk to him, to ask him who he had seen at the window, what had happened, but he never regained consciousness.   I know now when he died, although at the time, because his eyes fluttered and his mouth quivered, I thought he was trying to talk to me, I thought he had regained consciousness, but I know now that that was when he died, and that was about 20 minutes after he was hit.

CHAIRPERSON: Ten or fifteen minutes later, some time later, the police and ambulance arrived, and the manner in which they arrived was strange.  They didn't use sirens, we didn't hear any sirens.

CHAIRPERSON: The first we knew of their presence outside was a loud banging on the door.   When we asked who was there, we got no reply.   We were terrified at this point, fearing that the killer had returned to hurt us.   We shouted again and I remember getting up and Cathy and I running - I myself running towards the door and Cathy screaming at me to get away from the doors and the windows.   Shouted again, "Who is it?", and they didn't identify themselves, but after three or four calls to them who was it, they said, "It's the police, open up". Why did they do that?   Why didn't they immediately identify themselves?   Why were they so brusque when they did come into the house?

CHAIRPERSON: I remember, I think it was a - I think his name was Dan Mathee, or although I may be wrong, he was a big man in plain clothes, who was particularly rude, he grabbed the telephone from my hands as I was trying to call my mother to tell her what had happened, and Kim and I, with Cathy, were then escorted into my father's room, where we were kept and watched by a young and very shaken policeman, who kept on saying he thought it was going to be all right, it was going to be all right, my father would be all right.

CHAIRPERSON: Eventually after about an hour of sitting in that room I was allowed to phone my mother.   And we managed to contact other people, including Fowzia.

CHAIRPERSON: My father's body was taken away in the ambulance, and we too left the house with Lorrie Schlemmer, who summoned by a phone call from Cathy, had come to collect us.   When we left 32 Dalton Avenue, the drive and the garden were crammed with cars and police.  The house was literally  crawling with them, plain-clothes and otherwise. The only person I remember distinctly from that night was Dan Mathee, who wore plain clothes.

CHAIRPERSON: In the week after my father's murder, we received several threatening and abusive phone calls at the house.  One I remember from a man calling himself "Scorpio".  He said things like, "One down, two thousand to go", and, "We should have killed the lot of you".

CHAIRPERSON: An informal inquest found that my father was killed

CHAIRPERSON: by person or persons unknown, which I guess we could have told them without them having to go to the trouble, but anyway no formal inquest was ever held.

CHAIRPERSON: It seems to me more than strange that the Durban Murder and Robbery Unit, a unit with an excellent record of solving crimes, has never come up with even a strong lead, let alone a murderer.   It was rare for the killer of a white person in a white neighbourhood in 1978 not to be apprehended.   Even more unusual, when the victim was under surveillance, as we know my father had been almost constantly for at least five years.

CHAIRPERSON: An ex-BOSS agent, Martin Dolinchek recently pointed out to me that surveillance could be withdrawn and was often withdrawn if necessary.

CHAIRPERSON: Was our house under surveillance the night my father was killed, if not, who called it off?

CHAIRPERSON: Whoever killed my father did so with extreme efficiency and had the best assistance in covering up their tracks.   It seems to me that the only people capable of acting in such a way, were the members or handle-operatives of the then BOSS or security police.

CHAIRPERSON: It is important to note that Dad's assassination wasn't isolated.   We have heard that just weeks before he was killed, shots were fired at Fatima Meer's house.  Fatima had a lucky escape.

CHAIRPERSON: Some months after my father's death, Harold Strachan, who was also banned at that time, was confronted by a gunman at his front door.   That man fired several shots at Harold.   Fortunately Harold is here today to tell the story.

CHAIRPERSON: There is obviously a pattern of harassment and targeting of banned people nationwide, not just in Durban and in the 70s, but throughout the apartheid era.

CHAIRPERSON: Those banned people had been so effectively silenced, only their families and close friends and the people watching them, their guardians in BOSS and the security police, would have known they whereabouts and their habits.   Banned people were demonized by politicians and within the police.

CHAIRPERSON: As ex-policeman, Dirk Coetzee, and Martin Dolinchek, have explained to me, people like my father were not even accorded the dignity of being human, they were communist, terrorist scum.  They were literally sitting ducks.

CHAIRPERSON: My father seems to have been regarded by the security apparatus as particularly dangerous and irritatingly clever.   Jerry Marais and David Davis are two people who have lived to tell the story of detention.  Jeanette Curtis is one who didn't live.   But all three of them were questioned separately and extensively about my father and his political activities during their detentions in the mid to late 70s.