Eugene de Kock recounts thallium poisonings and source of bombing instructions

Former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock says he had all the information required to have senior politicians and generals prosecuted, but was not asked to testify.

The 77-year-old was on Monday before the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into possible interference and deliberate delays in the prosecution of apartheid-era crimes.

Vlakplaas was the infamous counterinsurgency unit that retrained captured liberation fighters to carry out attacks on liberation movements.

De Kock stressed that the generals involved in committing crimes during the 1980s were not prosecuted, suggesting it was done deliberately to shield National Party politicians.

“I believe that if the generals had been prosecuted, they would have disclosed the source of their instructions and that they would have implicated political officer bearers,” De Kock told the commission

Thallium poisoning of tinned food

De Kock was speaking about generals who could have faced prosecution when he shared a memory of dealing with former police commissioner General Johan van der Merwe.

De Kock attributed the idea for the distribution of poisoned food to then-Colonel Van der Merwe.

He explained that in a meeting with Van der Merwe shortly after Operation Koevoet’s launch in January 1979, the then head of security police for South West Africa elaborated on how he experimented with thallium in prisoners’ food.

The thallium would cause paralysis and De Kock alleged that those who died were cremated so as to avoid an autopsy that would show signs of poisoning.

De Kock said that when questions were asked, a young sergeant was made a scapegoat and subsequently relocated.

“He was the one who always had to take the food to the Article 29 prisoners, but he didn’t know it was poison.

“And they transferred him to a one-horse station about 30km from Piet Retief. There he was, alone, out of the way,” said De Kock.

The affected prisoners were being held under Article 29 of the Geneva Convention, which covers the treatment of prisoners of war.

Elaborating on the wider use of poisoned food, De Kock relayed that a Rhodesian Special Branch officer had told him that they would take samples of their enemies’ faeces for analysis.

“I thought they were testing them for lack of the necessary vitamins or where they get their food from. In the mean time it was thallium, because through that they could determine that these people were dead or totally disabled.

“Then he told me that they had to double the dose of thallium because the black people that was fighting them had a constitution twice as fast as a European, so they had to double the dose of thallium in the tinned food,” said De Kock.

Instructions came ‘from very high’

The former Vlakplaas commander, who was known as ‘Prime Evil’, had earlier explained that while he was not tasked with dealing with politicians, the generals took instructions from above.

He named former ministers Louis le Grange and Adriaan Vlok, claiming Le Grange signed off on the 1988 bombing of the ANC’s London offices, and that Vlok had twice come to Vlakplaas to congratulate him on the bombings of Cosatu House in 1987 and Khotso House in 1988.

“When I was instructed by Brigadier [Willem] Schoon to bomb Cosatu House, he told me that the instruction to do this was from very high.

“I asked him how high, and he said it came directly from President PW Botha,” said De Kock.

He stated that when the time came to testify on those matters, the issues were not addressed.

“I was willing and able to give evidence as to where the instructions came from that would have exposed the chain of command. I was not called as a witness to do so.

“Those who gave the instructions to the generals would have been at risk of exposure. If one wants to know why prosecutions did not take place, an obvious question is who benefitted from the failure?

“The answer is that those who benefitted where those who were at the top of the chain of command,” De Kock stated.