On Thursday, 2 January 1986, Colonel Eugene de Dock was in Vlakplaas, where he instructed Riaan Bellingan to go to Cape Town, where he was going to operate under the command of the apartheid Security Branch. He was to be supported by Joe Coetzer and askaris who were Thapelo Johannes Mbelo, Xola Frank “Jimmy” Mbane and Eric “Shakes” Maluleka, and an older askari known as “Captain Moss”, whose real name was Gladstone Mose (aka “Jackson Mlenze”).
Mose was the group leader of the Transkei section of the Luthuli Detachment during the Wankie Campaign and co-signed the Hani Memorandum following the challenges faced in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) ranks in 1969. Frequently the operatives from Vlakplaas worked with regional offices of the security police on particularly sensitive or complex operations.
One such operation became known as the DairyBelle murders (or the Killing of the “Gugulethu Seven”), where Vlakplaas operatives assisted by the Western Cape apartheid Security Police under Major General Griebenouw succeeded to create and eliminate an “enemy”.
When the State of Emergency was declared in 1985, Cape Town was not included in the 36 magisterial districts around Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth that were affected by the emergency decree. However, unrest spilled beyond those districts into the Western Cape and Natal.
On 28 August 1985, close to 3 000 youthful protesters marched from Gugulethu, in the Western Cape, towards a so-called Coloured towns
