S.A. police take fugitive from Dutch Embassy

Press, 12 July 1985, Page 6

S.A. police take fugitive from Dutch Embassy

NZPA-Reuter The Hague The Netherlands said yesterday that armed South African police had entered the Dutch embassy in Pretoria on Wednesday and recaptured a Dutch citizen who sought refuge in the building. A Dutch foreign ministry spokesman said that the South African Ambassador, David Louw, had been summoned by the Foreign Minister, Mr Hans van den Broek, yesterday to receive a strong protest against the violation of diplomatic immunity. He said that the police had entered the embassy and grabbed a Dutch sociologist, Klaas de Jonge, who had escaped handcuffed from the police during a tour of areas of Pretoria where he was alleged to have committed offences.

Mr de Jonge, aged 47, was detained on June 23 under section 29 of the Internal Security Act, which allows indefinite imprisonment for interrogation without charge or access to lawyers. He had been working as a history teacher in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare and went to South Africa for a job interview in the Bophutatswana homeland, north of Johannesburg. His former wife, Helena Pastoors, was detained on June 28.

Mr van den Broek had passed on a request to Mr Louw that Mr de Jonge be returned to the embassy and that measures be taken against the police, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. The Minister also had

sought assurances that such an incident would not happen again. In Cape Town two white women were charged with demonstrating illegally outside the South African Parliament yesterday over the death of a 13-year-old black boy in police detention.

A police spokesman said that Johannes Spogter, who was detained last Wednesday after unrest at the black township of Steytlerville, in the eastern Cape, had been found dead during “a routine cell visit” on Friday. It was not known why Johannes, who was not charged, had been arrested. The spokesman said .that a post-mortem examination would be held. Cornelia Bullen-Smith and Beverley Runciman were arrested and released on bail after chaining themselves to railings outside parliament. The police said that they would appear in court today, charged under a law that bans protests near the Parliament building. The women, both mothers of young children, carried placards saying: “A child has died in police custody” and, “We are horrified at his death.”

Mrs Bullen-Smith said, "I cannot go to the playground with my children, hang up my washing, cook or do my weekly shopping while I am aware that there is a mother who mourns her child who died while in the care of the police.” The South African Nobel

Peace Prize winner, the Rt Rev. Desmond Tutu, rescued a black man being attacked by an angry crowd yesterday after a funeral for four victims of anti-apartheid rioting. The incident occurred at the end of a service attended by more than 10,000 blacks in the township of Duduza, east of Johannesburg. It was the second mass funeral in as many days for victims of antiapartheid violence that left at least nine blacks dead.

A group of 50 to 60 blacks attacked a man suspected of being a black informer on the edge of the cemetery and set his car afire. Bishop Tutu waded into the group, waving his arms to shoo the crowd away as the man was being kicked and beaten with whips and some people were shouting, “kill him, kill him, burn him, burn him.” The crowd moved back as Bishop Tutu, dressed in maroon clerical garb, shouted at the group to stop the beating, and he ordered that the man be carried to a nearby car. But some in the angry mob pounded on the car as it drove away. “Tutu definitely saved the man’s life,” said one foreign reporter. Apart from that incident, the emotional funeral ended peacefully.

“God is on the side of freedom and justice,” Bishop Tutu told the throng inside a soccer stadium at the service for four blacks killed in grenade explosions two weeks ago.