On the night of 11 December 1989, at around 23:30, a huge explosion hit the north part of Park Station, shattering windows and spraying glass over a wide area. The explosion resulted in the death of two persons, with one person’s body being badly burned and the other’s parts being severed from the body and his remains being tossed up to sixty metres from the scene. The third person, who was a bit far from them, had his body thrown off by the ground by the severity of the blast, but he survived with a Soviet pistol in his hands.
The three victims of the blast were members of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s (MK) Ahmed Timol Unit, who were on a mission to sabotage the police barracks in Hilbrow as well as the freight railway line and locomotives in Park Station.
The three members of the Ahmed Timol Unit were Prakash Napier, the Commander of the Unit, Jameel Chand, who was the Commissar, who were both trained MK cadres, and Yusuf Akhalwaya, who was a final year Physical Education student at the University of the Witwatersrand, from which he was suspended for trying to protect a fellow student from arrest. Yusuf was an active member of the Call of Islam and the Lenasia Youth League. Their mission was to support the Railway Workers’ strike, which unfortunately went awry.
They had begun by planting a limpet mine at the Hilbrow Police Barracks, where Napier and Chand were focused on ensuring that the mine was appropriately placed, while Akalwaya was on the lookout for police abo
