MK Special Operations Combatant Marion Sparg is Arrested
Forty years ago, on 7 March 1986, after the apartheid President PW Botha had lifted the state of emergency during a speech in which he claimed that there had been a discernible drop in the levels of violence in South Africa, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Special Operations guerrilla, Marion Sparg (aka “Michelle”), was arrested. Apartheid policemen arrived at Sparg’s apartment, where one of the officers mentioned that they had come to arrest her in connection with the bombing of police stations.
While they were conducting a thorough search of the premises, the policemen found three limpet mines, as Marion Sparg casually commented that she thought they were there because of the Hillbrow bomb. After they asked where she placed the bomb in the Hillbrow Police Station, she told them that it was inside a plastic bag in the toilets. Immediately the apartheid senior police officers sent a team to Hillbrow station, where they performed a controlled detonation of the limpet mine.
The day following the killing of the Gugulethu Seven, on 4 March 1986, at approximately 09:00, Marion Sparg applied for a gun licence at John Vorster Square Police Station in central Johannesburg. Afterwards, Sparg made a detour to the stairway between the second and third floors of the police station, where she placed a limpet mine.
As the mine exploded around midday, it shattered windows up to the fourth floor, scattering glass rubble over a
