3 Ex-Policemen Blow Whistle on Alleged South Africa Death Squad : Apartheid: Former officers claim they were part of a team involved in killing civil rights activists. Police deny such squads existed--but if they did, ‘they were rogue units.’

PRETORIA, South Africa —  It wasn’t until the months of waiting on Death Row had dwindled to hours that former policeman Almond Nofomela began to panic. His former superiors had promised to win him a reprieve. But there he sat in Pretoria Central Prison, only a day away from the gallows--and a dirty secret about the police was about to die with him.

Nofomela felt the chill of betrayal when two police officers visited and “informed me that I should take the pain.”

That’s when Nofomela began to talk.

Now the desperate allegations of that condemned man have begun to pull back the curtain on a mysterious and sordid part of South Africa’s past, implicating for the first time a top-secret police unit in some of the dozens of unsolved murders of anti-apartheid activists.

Nofomela, who is black, a second black ex-policeman and their white captain have admitted being part of a formal political hit squad, operating under the command of generals in the South African police, that assassinated government opponents both here and abroad.

Among the squad’s alleged victims were white activist Ruth First, killed by a parcel bomb in neighboring Mozambique in 1982, and black civil rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge, abducted and stabbed to death in Durban in 1981.

Nofomela’s detailed affidavits describe several brutal assassinations, by knives, poison and silencer-equipped pistols, from 1981 until 1986. All victims were men and women the police suspected of being members of the outlawed African National Congress.

Much of Nofomela’s account was corroborated last week by the published statements of his former superior officer, Capt. Dirk Johannes Coetzee, who left the force in 1986.

“My men and I killed and eliminated political enemies of the government,” Coetzee, 44, told Vrye Weekblad (Free Weekly), a respected Afrikaans-language newspaper, last week after fleeing the country for the island of Mauritius and then Europe. “I never hesitated to carry out an order. I thought, ‘There are people who want to take this land, and they must be killed.’ ”

Coetzee, saying he now is troubled by his conscience, has identified a dozen ranking officers of the police force, including a current police general, who knew about or participated in the squad’s missions.

Maj. Gen. Herman Stadler, a senior police spokesman, denies the existence of any official hit squads in the national police force. If such squads existed, he said, they were rogue units, operating on their own, and any police officer who has “taken the law into his own hands . . . will have to be punished.”

But anti-apartheid leaders, long suspicious of the lack of arrests made by police in attacks on government opponents and their property, say the allegations by Nofomela and Coetzee, as well as other new evidence, point to high-level police involvement.

“This was done in an organized way, and it goes all the way to the top (of the police force),” said a member of a panel of anti-apartheid leaders who is familiar with the growing body of evidence gathered by human rights lawyers.

The group, formed to investigate increasing attacks on political activists, has collected Nofomela’s affidavits and evidence from the inmate’s home, including false passports, photographs of alleged hit squad victims and ammunition.

The police have launched their own investigation, directed by the chief public prosecutor in the Orange Free State and police Lt. Gen. Alwyn Conradie. But Coetzee claims officers have been destroying evidence at police headquarters, including internal log books, and he says officers in the unit have been told to deny everything.

Many community leaders have demanded an independent inquiry into the charges. Even the Citizen, a pro-government daily newspaper, called Monday for a judicial probe “to put the public’s mind at rest.”

Nofomela, 32, sentenced to death for murdering a white farmer while on a month’s leave from the force in 1987, has won a temporary stay of execution while the investigation continues. A second black member of the unit, David Tshikalange, confirmed Nofomela’s account before leaving the country. Capt. Coetzee is in hiding in Europe.

More than 100 anti-government activists have been murdered in the past 15 years, about half of them inside South Africa, according to human rights groups. In only one case has anyone been charged. Dozens of other activists have disappeared, many after being taken into custody by the authorities.

The government usually attributes the killings of ANC operatives to internal ANC power struggles. Incidents inside the country are often blamed on shadowy groups of white supremacists. Coetzee, in his interview with Vrye Weekblad, admitted that he directed a team of black policemen, known as “Askaris” or the “A-team,” who worked from a secret headquarters at Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria.

They abducted ANC operatives inside and outside South Africa and, during hours of interrogation, attempted to “turn” them into anti-terrorist police officers. Those they couldn’t “turn,” Coetzee said, were often killed, their bodies burned. On occasion, he said, he and his men received orders from senior officers in Pretoria to carry out assassinations.

Police have acknowledged the existence of the anti-terrorism unit at Vlakplaas, but they deny it was ever used to assassinate government opponents. Stadler, the police spokesman, said Vlakplaas is home base for former ANC guerrillas who are now “proud South African policemen.” He added police were “perturbed” that Coetzee had put the lives of those officers in jeopardy by identifying the farm.

The most damning allegations made by Coetzee and Nofomela concern the death eight years ago of Griffiths Mxenge, a prominent civil rights lawyer who was stabbed 45 times and had his throat cut.

Mxenge’s wife, Victoria, also a lawyer, vowed to bring the killers to justice. But in 1985 she was shot in front of her home by four black men who chased her to the front door and finished the job with an ax. No one was arrested in either case, although a witness later testified in an unrelated court case that Mrs. Mxenge’s assailants included a police sergeant.

In his affidavits, Nofomela says Brig. Willem Schoon and Capt. Coetzee ordered him and three other black policemen in 1981 to “eliminate” Mxenge, whom the police suspected of handling the financial affairs for the outlawed ANC. Coetzee “instructed us specifically not to shoot Mxenge, but to kill him with a knife.”

Nofomela and his three colleagues parked their truck in the middle of a road near Mxenge’s home and put the hood up. Mxenge, driving a white Audi, pulled up behind the men and “asked whether he could help us,” Nofomela said. “I approached the car and said, ‘Yes, please.’ He then switched off his ignition and I produced my firearm.”

The men drove Mxenge to an empty stadium and ordered him out of the car.

“We started assaulting him with kicks and punches, until he fell to the ground. We then all stabbed him several times. He immediately died, and we carried on butchering his body,” Nofomela said. Obeying Coetzee’s instructions, they removed Mxenge’s watch and billfold “to simulate a robbery.”

The radio-tape player was removed from Mxenge’s car, which was driven to the Swaziland border and burned in a field. The radio was later installed in Brig. Schoon’s police vehicle, according to Nofomela’s statement.

The next day, Coetzee handed each of the four men 1,000 rand, about $400, which he said was from Schoon “for successfully eliminating Mxenge.” (Schoon retired from the police force three weeks ago at age 55.)

Nofomela said he participated in eight other assassinations, including killings in neighboring Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, and many kidnapings during his stint in the unit.

In his interview with Vrye Weekblad, Coetzee admitted ordering Nofomela and his colleagues to murder Mxenge and make it look like a robbery. He also acknowledged paying them each a 1,000-rand bonus “for their good work.”

Coetzee also claimed that:

His unit broke into the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Mbabane, Swaziland, and stole files, telexes and a variety of envelopes bearing the commission emblem. One of those envelopes was later used to hide the parcel bomb that was mailed to Maputo, Mozambique, and killed activists Ruth First, wife of South African Communist Party General Secretary Joe Slovo, a senior member of the ANC in exile. (First’s life with her daughter was the subject of the film, “A World Apart.”)

He and other officers used a sleeping potion developed by the police forensics lab to drug two suspected ANC members and then shot them in the head with a 9-millimeter Makarov pistol equipped with a silencer, burned the bodies and tossed the ashes into a river.

A bomb used to blow up the ANC offices in London in 1982 was smuggled into Britain in the South African Embassy’s diplomatic pouch.

Police Maj. Gen. Stadler has portrayed the claims as the “wild and untested allegations” of a Death Row inmate trying to save his life and a disgruntled white police officer who was suspended from the force.

Coetzee, who suffers from diabetes, was allowed to retire early and keep his rank after his conviction at a departmental hearing on charges of sending a telephone-tapping report to political opponents of the government and asking a fellow officer to help him bring $150,000 illegally into the country.

Coetzee told Vrye Weekblad that he decided to leave the country and admit his role in the police hit squad because “I have no future in South Africa. I owe it to my wife and children to begin a new life.”

For his role in the assassinations and bombings, he said, “I think of myself with contempt.”