
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990                   TAG: 9003061809
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH                                 LENGTH: Short

OFFICIAL REPORTS DEEDS OF TOP-SECRET SQUAD

Members of a secret intelligence unit planted bombs, were suspects in political killings and plotted to harass Archbishop Desmond Tutu by sending him a baboon fetus, an intelligence official said Monday.

Gen. Rudolph Badenhorst, head of the Military Intelligence branch of the Defense Force, was the first witness before a judicial inquiry into allegations of military and police participation in death squads.

Opposition leaders claim the squads may have been involved in about 60 unsolved murders of anti-government activists in the past decade.

Badenhorst said the Civil Cooperation Bureau - a unit so secret that President F.W. de Klerk says he was not told of its existence until recently - had blown up a Pretoria store owned by an anti-apartheid activist, exploded a bomb at a community hall in a mixed-race township near Cape Town, and planned to deliver a baboon fetus to Tutu, an anti-apartheid leader and winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

The intelligence chief said an internal military investigation revealed that prominent anti-apartheid activists were on a list to have their movements monitored.

The secret unit reportedly consisted of cells of civilians working against government opponents.

An attorney for the Civil Cooperation Bureau said its chief, Col. Joe Verster, had been detained Friday for questioning by police who are investigating the 1989 assassinations of David Webster, a Johannesburg anthropologist, and Anton Lubowski of the South-West African People's Organization in Namibia.

by CNB