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Toda
y's public hearings of the Hefer Commission are expected to
provide greater clarity on the availability of apartheid-era
intelligence files to aid its investigation.
Advocate George Bizos SC is scheduled to make a submission during
the day on behalf of the country's intelligence agencies.
He will be representing the ministers of safety and security,
intelligence services and defence, as well as the secretary for
defence, the national police commissioner and the directors general
of the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Secret
Service.
This will follow a request by the commission, on behalf of main
accusers Mac Maharaj and Mo Shaik, for a wide range of
apartheid-era files.
These apparently also include documents now held by the police and
defence force's intelligence units.
Last week, Judge Joos Hefer indicated that at that stage the
commission did not have any probative documentation.
He said documents should form an important part of his eventual
finding on whether national director of public prosecutions
Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy.
The National Intelligence Agency later issued a statement saying it
was facing legal constraints with regard to providing the requested
files.
It was legally obliged to protect its sources and methods, the NIA
maintained.
Witnesses to be called before the commission today are Mbulelo
Hongo and the government official who handled Ngcuka's passport
application in the eighties.
A September newspaper report suggested that Ngcuka was granted this
passport by the apartheid government in return for spying on his
former activist comrades.
Hongo was jailed together with Ngcuka in 1982 for refusing to
testify in a treason trial. – Sapa.
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