South Africa death squad leader to be freed

Apartheid death-squad leader Eugene de Kock, dubbed ‘Prime Evil’ for his role in the torture and murder of scores of black South African activists in the 1980s and early 1990s, was granted parole after more than 20 years in prison.

Justice Minister Michael Masutha told a news conference de Kock would be released “in the interests of nation-building and reconciliation” and because he had expressed remorse at his crimes and helped authorities recover the remains of some of his victims.

The decision, which had been deferred several times over the last year, remains contentious in a country still dealing with the legacy of repression and brutality meted out by the white-minority regime that prevailed from 1948 to 1994.

Masutha stressed that his decision was guided only by the law, an attempt to deflect criticism from the many South Africans — black and white — who regard de Kock’s crimes as so extreme he should die behind bars.

The date of the 66-year-old’s release from Pretoria ‘C-Max’ High Security prison would be kept secret, Masutha added.

As head of an apartheid counter-insurgency unit at Vlakplaas, a farm 20km west of Pretoria, de Kock is believed to have been responsible for more atrocities than any other man in the efforts to preserve white rule.

Arrested in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) came to power, he was sentenced two years later to 212 years in prison on charges ranging from murder and attempted murder, to kidnapping and fraud.

However, at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1995 to try to unearth — and, in some cases, forgive — crimes committed by both sides, de Kock came clean about the killing of many ANC activists.

Even from behind bars, the bespectacled de Kock continued to cast his shadow over the post-apartheid South Africa.

In a 2007 radio interview, he accused FW de Klerk, the last white president, of having hands “soaked in blood” for ordering political killings. De Klerk, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Mandela, has denied the allegations.

Two years ago, he wrote to the mother of ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, who was killed by a bomb in 1991, asking for her forgiveness.

“Your forgiveness will mean a lot to me, but it can in no way wash away the pain I have caused,” he said in the letter, which appeared in South African newspapers.

However, in the same year he met Marcia Khoza, the daughter of ANC activist Portia Shabangu, whom de Kock executed after an ambush in Swaziland in 1989.

“We greeted each other and shook hands. His handshake was firm,” she said after the meeting, at which de Kock described how he shot Khoza’s mother twice in the head.