Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-24

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Yes, I feel very much that they are involved because we went to the police station after the burial, to go and find out.  So we met Sgt Pretorius.  We got into the police station, a certain room where there are pictures
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right round, pictures taken of different accidents. He showed us one cow which is alive.  He said to us this is the cow that killed your brother.  He showed us another picture where it was flat, you could only see the skin.  He said this is what happened when your brother died, this is how the cow looked like, after the ten cars went on it, drove over it.  So he was actually laughing and he wasn't serious at all.

CHAIRPERSON: You mean if ...

MAMSESE MHLONGO: We asked for a death certificate and a ...

CHAIRPERSON: Post-mortem or ...

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Post mortem, yes.  We asked for a post-mortem and the death certificate.  We don't have that up to today.  He promised that after the investigation we will get the post-mortem certificate.

CHAIRPERSON: So you haven't had the certificate.  Was there an inquest?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: There was an inquest.  We were asked to go and right affidavits. My sister is one of the people who had to write an affidavit.  Dick's fiancee had to write and the friends and my cousin, who went to collect his car.  So the two affidavits, that is Dick's fiancee's affidavit and the friend's affidavit, never reached the magistrate. When we questioned.  We went to Dick's friend's home to go and find out why didn't he write the affidavit. He said he wrote two of them.  He took them to Orlando police station. He doesn't know why they didn't why they didn't reach Natal.
 We asked Dick's fiancee why didn't she write an affidavit. She said to us she is not above the law. If the police said to her she mustn't, she could not write it.

CHAIRPERSON: So she actually admitted that the police had
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told her not to?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Yes.

CHAIRPERSON: Could you just tell us a little bit about - you mentioned that he was going to investigate cases. You said in your statement, you described him as a political activist and said that he was involved in particular sorts of cases.  Could you describe that a little for us.

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Dick served articles under Priscilla Janna and on two occasions he flew to PE. I am not certain what the cases were about. The morning when he was killed, there was a case in Welkom which he had to go and investigate.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Before asking my lawyer colleague here to ask you some more questions.  Ruth, would you like to say something now as well?

RUTH RADEBE: I would like to say Dick wasn't killed by an accident, he was murdered, because the car he was driving in didn't have a dent. When we went down to Natal to go and identify the corpse, the car had no dent on it and it had white seats, which didn't have a drop of blood on it.  So it looked as if he was pulled out of the car and he had deep gashes on the head and on the neck.  The neck was wide open here.  So Dick wasn't killed by an accident  When we went down for an inquest, those policemen took out photos to show us the cow which was alive. I asked them a question, why did they take that picture of a cow which was alive. They anticipated the accident.  Did they anticipate that Dick was going to be killed by this cow when they took the photo of the cow which was alive. They couldn't answer me.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

RUTH RADEBE: So between the police and also I had an opportunity of talking to the guy which was his best friend,
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and asked him what killed Dick. So he told me why shouldn't I ask my sister-in-law, because they both know what killed Dick. That was Dick's friend.  He and his fiancee, they both know.  So we couldn't ask Dick's fiancee, because already she had an attitude.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Could I just confirm.  This police station that you are referring to, where Sgt Burger and Sgt Pretorius were, that was the Harrismith police station?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Yes.

CHAIRPERSON: Could I at this stage ask Yasmin, as the lawyer amongst us, to carry on.

YASMINE SOOKA: I just want to check something. You say that you were shown a photograph of a car that had been flattened.  But that was not the car that Dick was driving in?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Not the car, the dead cow.

YASMINE SOOKA: The dead cow?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: We were shown the photographs of the cow whilst still alive and when it died, when it was actually lying on the road.

YASMINE SOOKA: Okay.  Dick's car, were you given an opportunity to have a look at it, what actually happened to it, once the accident had taken place?

RUTH RADEBE: Yes, my cousin went down actually to get the car back home.  The car didn't have a dent but we couldn't drive the car back home.  So when we were shown this is where Dick died and his car collapsed after the accident. It overturned after the accident, when it on top of the cow it overturned, but it didn't have any damage, it didn't have anything.  Only the back wheels were done something, so that it couldn't move.

YASMINE SOOKA: You said that Dick, it is impossible for Dick to
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have flown out of the sun roof.  Was that because he was very big or ...?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: It is not possible that Dick flew out of the top roof.  I don't see how he could fly out of the top roof, especially that the friend said nothing about it.  I think he should have indicated something of that sort, to say this is what happened to Dick.

YASMINE SOOKA: Did Dick's employer try to investigate the matter?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: She is one of the first people we asked to investigate, to call Dick's friend to the office and talk to him.  She called him and she said that he was shivering throughout and he says nothing.  The last words he said is "I slept", meaning that he saw nothing at all.

YASMINE SOOKA: The friend and Dick's fiancee, what do they do, are they lawyers as well?

RUTH RADEBE: No.

MAMSESE MHLONGO: They are at school together from high school, they went to Fort Hare.  They were employed in the same company.  They enrolled with (indistinct) and they were good friends.  Whenever there was something they would be together.  That is why he was supposed to have been Dick's best friend.

YASMINE SOOKA: The fiancee?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: The fiancee, they were at school together, they met at school. They have been together for some time before actually engaging for marriage.  She did accounts.  The fiancee did accounts and then the friend did the same course with Dick, BA Law and then LL.B.

YASMINE SOOKA: Did Dick's employer ever come back to you to tell you she had been able to discover anything or did the police SOWETO HEARING TRC/GAUTENG
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ever come back to you?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: Nobody has ever come to us, come back to us, no one.

YASMINE SOOKA: And nobody ever came back to tell you what happened about the car either?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: No, we reported the car and we asked to look for it. In fact, we spent almost three hours running around from one point to the other, going to the scrapyards, to the police stations, trying to find the car.  No one has ever come back to say or find out how far have you got with the investigation.

YASMINE SOOKA: Do you remember what the make of the car was and what the registration was?

MAMSESE MHLONGO: I don't remember the registration but it was a Golf, a white Golf, an '83 model.

YASMINE SOOKA: You didn't get your own doctor to be present during the post-mortem?