Commander Lizo Bright Ngqungwana of the Western Cape
Forty years ago, at around 02:00 in the morning of 23 April 1986, while Lizo Bright Ngqungwana was asleep in a three-roomed cabin in Crossroads, Cape Town, with his girlfriend and their seven-week-old child, he saw lights flickering through the window. The lights silhouetted the frame of a person standing outside the house, which made Ngqungwana to wake up and watch.
Sergeant Riaan Bellingan, who was a police operative at the Vlakplaas Section C Unit and was still on his secondment to the apartheid Security Branch in Cape Town, was part of a team of fourteen security policemen who stormed the premises. They focussed their torches on Ngqungwana, who was at the time sitting on the bed, with his hand under a pillow. When the police heard a click, as Ngqungwana was opening the safety pin of his Makarov pistol, they pounced and arrested him before he could make any further moves. They then took the pistol from him.
At dawn, Ngqungwana was taken to Gugulethu Police Station in Loop Street, where he was brutally interrogated and repeatedly accused of being an Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Western Cape Commander. Eventually, he was shown a picture of himself in the police’s “Terrorist Album”, which proved to be the tipping point in the questioning. When he was asked when he came into the country, he replied that that he entered the country in June 1985. After his arrest, that evening, Ngqungwana’s Comrade, Quentin Michels
