South Africa Probing the Hit Squads

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.