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The Strange Murder Of South
Africa's Former First Lady
From Jan Lamprecht
pbs@iafrica.com
12-9-1

Adriana's Stujit's Latest Report
on the De Klerk Murder
 
Adriana is a veteran journalist. She knows what she's doing. This thing is sure different. It will be interesting to see where it leads.
 
Jan
 
 
From Adriana Stuijt
12-8-1
 
Picture of Luyanda Mboniswa, 21, the mysterious South African security guard with a clean criminal record, who also is the sole financial supporter of his mother and siblings -- but who confessed to the murder of South Africa''s previous first lady, Mrs Marike de Klerk before a magistrate on Thursday. A week before the De Klerk murder, the security guard had also reported a burglary at his rented $100-a-month squatter shack in Khayelitsha township to police , during which music equipment had reportedly been stolen.
 
Dec. 8, 2001 - The Sunday Times of Johannesburg published this picture of Luyanda Mboniswa, 21, the security guard employed by Securicor Gray, the company assigned to protect the apartment block north of Cape Town where South Africa's previous First Lady, Mrs Marike de Klerk, was strangled to death last week.
 
The security guard was arrested and confessed before a magistrate to the murder ot Mrs de Klerk.
 
Jounralists Bonny Schoonakker and Michael Schmidt of the Sunday Times reported that Mboniswa's family, friends and employers were shocked at the confession by the guard -- whom they said was " a model employee and a breadwinner who supported the rest of his family."
 
Nothing was robbed from Mrs de Klerk's apartment although her cellphone still seems to be missing. It was a call made from Mrs de Klerk's aparment from this missing cellphone which was traced by police to a Khayelitsha telephone -- and which had led to Mboniswa's arrest and confession.
 
Also, journalist Freek Swart of the Rapport Afrikaans Sunday newspaper wrote that the security guard may not have acted alone - police are still investigating the possibility of a murder conspiracy.
 
Swart quoted unnamed police detectives as saying that South Africa's former first lady might have been murdered last week to silence her, because she might have threatened to inform police about a diamond smuggling network which involved someone close to her.
 
Mrs De Klerk was apparently approached "by a person who wanted to borrow money from her for a "transaction", but she refused. "The person involved either murdered her personally or hired someone to do it at a fee," the source said.
 
The security guard will appear in court on Monday, but the investigation continues. Cape Town East Metropole police spokesman Superintendent Wicus Holtzhausen said the security guard had confession before a magistrate in court on Thursday night.
 
Meanwhile back in Motherwell, near Port Elizabeth, Sunday Times reporters noted that the security guard's mother's eyes had filled with tears as she watched a TV broadcast of the press conference retired South African President F W de Klerk had held following Marike's memorial service in Cape Town on Saturday.
 
Mrs Cynthia Mboniswa said that Luyanda - her eldest child whom she had raised alone since the age of one when she divorced his father - paid the school fees of his younger siblings, Ayanda, 18, in Grade 10, and Andiswa, 10, in Grade 4. He also supported her and his 85-year-old grandfather.
 
"I cried when I heard," she said. "I want to go to Cape Town, but I have no money. I'm afraid for him. He was not politically involved. "
 
In Khayelitsha, Lilian Dyasi, who lived a few doors away from Mboniswa, said she was the mother of Mboniswa's 22-year-old girlfriend, Victoria Dyasi.
 
She said both she and her daughter had been taken to Bishop Lavis Police Station for questioning on Friday afternoon. There, they saw Mboniswa for the first time since his arrest on Wednesday night at the Dolphin Beach apartment complex in Table View, where he worked and where the murder took place.
 
Dyasi said that although she was allowed to return to her home in Khayelitsha later on Friday afternoon, her daughter Victoria was detained for further questioning.
 
But police insisted that no charges were being considered against any other suspects.
 
Dyasi said her daughter had known Mboniswa since he moved into their street in December last year, five months after he was employed by Securicor Gray in Cape Town.
 
Mkhumbuzi Ncedani, who rents out Mboniswa's squatter shack to him for R100 a month, said that when detectives arrived at the premises on Friday afternoon, he thought they had come to investigate a burglary at the shack which Mboniswa had reported to police last weekend. Police had arrived last Sunday and lifted fingerprints at the shack, from which Mboniswa's hi-fi set and other personal items had been stolen.
 
The shack is a 2m by 4m wooden structure with barely enough room for his double bed and a table. On Friday afternoon, the bed was strewn with Mboniswa's clothing after detectives had rummaged through the shack, looking for Mrs De Klerk's cellphone and any other clues.
 
The shack's only decorations are a poster of football player Doctor Khumalo and a newspaper clipping of a successful local businessman.
 
A unit of the SA Police Service used sophisticated technology to identify the alleged killer within five hours of her body being discovered. According to police, members of the Pretoria-based unit made their conclusion at about 9pm on Tuesday.
 
Earlier on Saturday, Marike de Klerk was buried in a private ceremony at the Rebecca Street Cemetery in Pretoria West. Hundreds of people gathered at the Wapadrant Gereformeerde Kerk in Pretoria around noon on Saturday to mourn Mrs De Klerk.
 
The mourners were led by her ex-husband, retired South African president F W de Klerk, his current wife Elita, and the presidential couple's three adopted children Jan and Willem de Klerk; and Susan Hillocks.
 
Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, chair of the ANC women's league, who also attended the service, told the news media that South Africa's previous First Lady's death was an indictment of the crime situation in the country.
 
"It's a tragedy that a fine woman who has contributed so much to the history of our country should have left us in such a tragic manner," she said. "This could be a message from God to wake South Africans up, she said. "We should all do much more about the crime situation, not only the government."
 
Mrs De Klerk was buried in the Wapadrant Reformed Church in Pretoria on Saturday. - Rapport/Sapa
 
Mrs Susan Hillocks, Mrs de Klerk's daughter, said she believed that the confessed killer had clearly gone to kill her mother. "It was like a terrible act of revenge. The brute force which he used to kill her, tells the entire story," she told Rapport newspaper.
 
"If the suspected killer was simply out to rob her, he could have done so for the entire two months my mother had been away from her flat. He could have broken in throughout that time, he had all the time in the world to rob the flat, but no, he clearly wanted to kill her," Mrs Hillocks said.
 
She said her mother was unarmed and did not own any firearms.
 
All three the De Klerk siblings are adopted. Jan is a farmer near Ottosdal in North West Province, and Willem is a businessman of Cape Town whose record shows a checkered financial career.
 
As a young man he was engaged to Erica Adams,the daughter of a coloured parliamentarian -- and his mother had been very opposed to the relationship, which was ended before it culminated in marriage.
 
Since then he was married and divorced and now has a new girl friend. He also landed in financial trouble in his business dealings and was sued three times in the Cape Town civil court for debts incurred with Nedkor-Bank, Stellenbosch Farmers' Winemakers Cooperative and a Cape-Town based company called Scoble en Scoble.
 
 
 
 
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