Vlakplaas Murderous Cross-Border Raid into Swaziland
On 4 June 1986, a senior African National Congress (ANC) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operative, Philip Ngwana Makau Edward Khuto (aka “Pansu or Pantsu Smith”), and two other ANC members, Busi ‘Mzala’ Majola and Sipho Dlamini, who was a key figures in Angola intelligence structures, were killed in a raid on a house in the Dalraich section of Mbabane, Swaziland. Pansu was believed by the apartheid security police to be running an ANC cell involved in the movement of weapons and giving short courses on the use of limpet mines. The attack was a cross-border assassination executed by the apartheid Security Branch and the Vlakplaas unit, since members of the Security Branch’s Soweto Intelligence Unit (SIU) had succeeded in infiltrating Pansu’s cell.
The operation was undertaken following a meeting between General Johan van der Merwe, who was then head of the apartheid Security Branch, and General Ignatius Coetzee, Brigadier Willem Schoon, Colonel Eugene de Kock, head of the Vlakplaas Unit, and Colonel Lodewyk ‘Tiekie’ de Jager of the Soweto Intelligence Unit (SIU). The meeting was to discuss the “September Machinery” of MK, which was considered to be responsible for rural operations, including the landmine attack in Breyten on 21 April 1986. At the meeting, General van der Merwe agreed that the “September Machinery”, which was part of the Transvaal Implementation Machinery, based in Swaziland, had to
