TRUTH INTERRUPTED?: TRC investigator shut down interview probing Dulcie September murder, inquiry hears

Dulcie September’s family wants to know who told the TRC special investigations chief to abruptly terminate the Paris interview, shortly after the mention of a man tied to French arms companies and reportedly linked to the murder conspiracy and cover-up, the inquiry into delayed post-TRC prosecutions has heard.

Controversial chief of special investigations for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the late Lawandhle Magadhla, at the mention of the French arms industry, abruptly terminated an interview probing the 1988 assassination of ANC chief representative Dulcie September, the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into delayed post-TRC prosecutions has heard.

Former Swedish police investigator Jan-Åke Kjellberg, seconded to the TRC in 1996, told the i nquiry on 12 August that Magadhla had unexpectedly joined him on 21 November 1997 during an interview with French Socialist party official Jean-Bernard Curial.

The investigation had moved to Paris to gather evidence from French police and officials as well as other witnesses after September’s assassination by unknown gunmen at the ANC offices in that city in 1988. She was shot five times with a .22 calibre rifle equipped with a silencer on 29 March. She was 53.

Reports published in France alleged French involvement in September’s assassination. At the time she was the ANC representative in that country and had been investigating how the international weapons embargo was being bypassed in Europe.

There were specific allegations that the French weapons industry was delivering arms to South Africa despite sanctions. French media had also accused Alain Guenon, who was tied to French arms companies, of being linked to the September murder conspiracy and the cover-up.

The gunman has never been identified and speculation is that September was murdered by apartheid government agents.

The interview with Curial had taken place at the official residence of the then South African ambassador to France, Barbara Masekela, said Kjellberg.

“I do not know the reason for it, but I asked Mr Curial if he knew a man called Mr Alain Guenon,” he said. Guenon’s name had appeared in a number of reports and documents related to September’s murder, he added.

He told the inquiry that when he informed Curial that, according to Dutch anti-apartheid organisation, The Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, Guenon had been “decorated” by President Nelson Mandela, Curial had balked.

“He stood up immediately and told us that if that was true, that he had been decorated, we should stop the investigation,” Kjellberg said.

It was then that Magadhla had left the room for about 20 minutes to make a phone call. He returned, said Kjellberg, and “ordered that the meeting end” and that the room be vacated.

The facts, however, are that Mandela had not decorated Guenon. This was a claim that had caused “considerable distress” to those close to September.

Magadhla’s appointment to the TRC investigating team was controversial at the time. He was the former regional KwaZulu-Natal director of the ANC’s Department of Intelligence and Security (Mbokodo).