Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The convictions and sentences of two senior 121 Battalion officers were set aside by judges Nic van der Reyden and Piet Koen on appeal in the Pietermaritzburg high court on Friday.

The officers, Lieut-Col Louis van Eeden, officer commanding of 121 Battalion at Mtubatuba near St Lucia, and Maj Ferdinand Labuschagne, law officer of the battalion, were convicted of defeating the ends of justice by regional magistrate L Naidoo in the Eskhawini court near Richard's Bay in November 2004.

Each was fined R4 000, or two years jail, plus five years jail suspended.

Van der Reyden said that the catalyst leading to their arrest, trial and conviction was the arrest of two fellow officers, the battalion intelligence officer Maj J Bronkhorst and the transport officer, Major P Goosen, on a charge of conspiring to murder the second in command of Maj M Maekwane.

The main witness in the conspiracy case against Bronkhorst and Goosen was Rifleman M Sithole.

The state alleged that Van Eeden and Labuschagne intervened on behalf of Bronkhorst and Goosen by influencing Sithole to retract his statement -his first - to the police in which he alleged that Bronkhorst and Goosen plotted to murder Manekwane.

On the same day Labuschagne took Sithole to a Mtubatuba SAPS officer and Sithole then retracted his first statement saying that he had been forced to falsely implicate Bronkhorst and Goosen in the plot to kill Manekwane.

When Sithole's retracting statement was handed to a prosecutor she told the SAPS investigating officer of Sithole' second statement.

That same evening the police obtained a third statement from Sithole in which he retracted his second statement and said his first statement implicating Bronkhorst and Goosen was true.

In his judgment magistrate Naidoo said: "This case has all the characteristics of a tragic play where the prejudices, bias and so forth based on race kinmanship, partisanship and other prejudices are rife, and were indeed exposed."

Van der Reyden said that one would have expected a regional magistrate to approach the case with an objective and open mind.

"However he did not do so. He lost sight of the fact that Sithole's two statements revealed two possible plots - a conspiracy of white officers to get rid of Manekwane and/or a conspiracy by black officer officers to get rid of white officers.

"It is clear that the magistrate closed his mind to the probability that Sithole had falsely implicated Bronkhorst and Goosen, that he went to Labuschagne of his own volition and disclosed to him the falsity of his third statement and that his second statement retracting his first statement reflected the true position.

"This oversight by the magistrate resulted in him defining the main plot solely based on the state case.

"He also overlooked the fact that a finding that Sithole went to Labuschagne on his own volition and told him the true position - that he had falsely implicated Bronkhorst and Goosen - could only have one outcome: an acquittal on the charge of defeating the course of justice," Van der Reyden said.

Judge Koen concurred.