Apartheid’s most notorious killer says he knows everything about who gave the orders – and claims the country’s top prosecutors deliberately refused to hear it.
Former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock, dubbed Prime Evil, has told the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry that former National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) prosecutors, Advocates Gerrie Nel and Anton Ackerman, are to blame for the failure to prosecute apartheid-era crimes referred by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Testifying before retired Justice Sisi Khampepe on Monday, De Kock painted himself not as a rogue operator, but as a foot soldier who served 20 years in C-Max maximum security prison while the architects of apartheid murders walked free because the NPA shut the door on his evidence.
“I know everything,” De Kock told the commission, claiming he was ready to reveal the chain of command – the names, dates, times and places where orders for killings originated.
This, he said, includes orders that came from the very top of the apartheid state, including former presidents PW Botha and FW de Klerk.
According to him, no one ever asked where the orders came from.
In explosive testimony, De Kock detailed how he tried to intervene in a major Eastern Cape case while still in prison.
He said when the court went into recess, he contacted his lawyer and asked him to phone the then Attorney-General for the Eastern Cape, Les Roberts.
“I said, look, phone Mr Les Roberts in the Eastern Cape. Tell him I will testify,” De Kock said.
According to De Kock, Roberts boarded an early flight on a Saturday morning, flew to Pretoria, came to the prison, took his full statement, and flew back to Port Elizabeth. The plan was for De Kock to testify in the Motherwell trial, where security policemen were facing charges for the killing of anti-apartheid activists.
But the offer, he claims, triggered anger among certain prosecutors.
“When Les Roberts informed Advocate [D’Oliveira] that I’m there to testify, he was apparently very unhappy about it,” De Kock said, before being stopped from using stronger language to describe the prosecutor’s reaction.
He insisted his decision to testify was voluntary.
“I volunteered to give evidence. I was not coerced by anybody from the legal teams in Pretoria. I initiated the call when I saw the newspaper article,” he said.
The Motherwell case eventually collapsed after two key witnesses who had been given indemnity under Section 204 failed to implicate senior officers. De Kock claims his offer to testify could have changed the outcome, but the prosecution was not interested.
‘A secrecy this country will never know’
De Kock, who commanded the C10 counter-insurgency unit at Vlakplaas – a farm west of Pretoria that became synonymous with kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial killings – said he trained askaris, former MK and APLA fighters turned by the security police to hunt their former comrades.
He joined the police in 1968, entered counter-insurgency in 1983, and was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to two life terms plus 212 years. He served 19 years before being paroled in 2015.
During the TRC hearings in 1997 and 1998, he applied for amnesty for more than 100 offences, including murder, torture and fraud, and exposed how Vlakplaas operated as a state-sanctioned death squad.
Now, he says, while he took the fall, the democratic state protected others.
The Khampepe Commission was established after families of victims, frustrated by decades of inaction, took government to court alleging a political deal to suppress TRC prosecutions.
Former President Thabo Mbeki has dismissed claims of an informal immunity deal between the ANC, the National Party and apartheid generals as a “complete fabrication,” arguing that his administration actually created a specialised unit within the NPA to handle TRC cases and that any delays lay with the prosecuting authority itself.
That argument now finds an unlikely ally in De Kock.
For De Kock, the result is a dark secret South Africa was never allowed to hear.
“There is a secrecy that the country will never know,” he told the commission, implying that full details of who ordered what, and why those orders were never prosecuted, remain buried in dockets that were never pursued.