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The
Hefer Commission will hear more about national Director of
Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka's much discussed passport when
it resumes its public hearings today.
Commission secretary John Bacon said on Thursday Durban attorney KE
Mlabe was to testify before Judge Joos Hefer.
In earlier testimony before the commission it was alleged that he
was the attorney who was handed Ngcuka's passport for safekeeping
after he (Ngcuka) was imprisoned in the early eighties.
The apartheid government's granting of the passport to Ngcuka is
one of the main pillars of allegations that he acted as a spy for
the apartheid government.
Martha Duma Tutu earlier refuted this by telling the commission
that Ngcuka applied for the passport through her travel agency
before the security police arrested him in 1981.
The agency was a front for the African National Congress to arrange
travel documents for activists going into exile.
The passport was granted while Ngcuka was in detention and before
he was sentenced, Tutu testified.
She picked it up on his behalf from the erstwhile department of
bantu affairs.
She later handed it to Mlabe after the security police started
harassing her.
Ngcuka reportedly used the passport after his release from prison
to travel to Switzerland, where he joined his wife.
His main accuser, Mo Shaik, questioned the fact that the apartheid
government apparently failed to enforce travel restrictions on
Ngcuka.
This suggested that he worked for them, Shaik maintained.
He argued that Ngcuka should have been blacklisted by the time the
passport was granted, or at least after his release from
prison.
Bacon said yesterday the Department of Home Affairs was still
perusing its records to find more information about Ngcuka's
passport for the commission.
The government pension fund would hand the commission a letter
today confirming that self-confessed apartheid spy Vanessa Brereton
qualified for benefits. This resulted from her employment as a
government agent during the eighties.
The fund has already confirmed that Ngcuka did not qualify for
similar benefits.
Ngcuka was earlier accused of having acted as apartheid agent
RS452, but Brereton has confessed she was this spy. – Sapa.
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