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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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121889
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12188900.036
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1990-09-19
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WORLD, Page 30SOUTH AFRICAProbing the Hit SquadsDe Klerk investigates a rash of apparent assassinations
One late afternoon eight years ago, Griffiths Mxenge, a
well-known black lawyer and antiapartheid campaigner in the city
of Durban, was driving home when he stopped to help four men whose
pickup truck had apparently broken down. According to an affidavit
given to the police, the men abducted Mxenge, drove him to a field
outside a nearby soccer stadium, stabbed him repeatedly and then
left him to die in a pool of blood.
Since 1977 nearly 50 government opponents have been murdered
under murky circumstances, the victims of apparent assassinations.
Few of their killers have been identified, let alone apprehended
by the authorities. Last week long-standing suspicions that police
hit squads were behind at least some of the murders were bolstered
by State President F.W. de Klerk's decision to order an inquiry.
He announced that the Ministry of Law and Order and the Ministry
of Justice would conduct a fresh investigation into the allegedly
political murders of Mxenge and 79 other victims, whose names were
on a list that De Klerk gave to his Justice Minister.
The government had been under growing pressure to take action
since the hit-squad affair burst onto the front pages of the
country's newspapers in October. At that time a prisoner on death
row, former policeman Butana Almond Nofomela, alleged that he had
been part of a team that "eliminated" Mxenge in 1981. After being
named in Nofomela's affidavit, former police captain Dirk Coetzee
went public in the weekly newspaper Vrye Weekblad with a story of
how he headed a police hit squad between 1980 and 1982 that carried
out at least nine assassinations, including that of Mxenge, as well
as numerous bombings and abductions. "I was in the heart of the
whore," declared Coetzee, who accused senior police officers of
authorizing assassinations.
In launching the new probe, officials said they would prosecute
Nofomela for his role in Mxenge's murder. They also planned to
issue a warrant for Coetzee's arrest. But tracking him down is
proving to be difficult. Coetzee, who apparently made his
confession out of fear that his former superiors would try to make
him a scapegoat, fled the country last month, and has been
variously reported living in Europe, elsewhere in Africa and on the
island of Mauritius.