Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – Notorious Apartheid-era killer Eugene de Kock will be released on parole, Justice Minister Michael Masutha confirmed on Friday.
“In the interest of nation building, I have placed Mr De Kock on parole,” said Masutha. However, he said, the time and date of his release would not be made public.
At the same time, he announced that Clive Derby-Lewis, convicted for the murder of SA Communist Party leader Chris Hani, was denied medical parole.
This followed earlier reports that the medical parole board had recommended that Derby-Lewis, who suffers from stage three lung cancer, be released from custody.
Masutha said he was not convinced that Derby-Lewis had shown real remorse for his actions.
Derby-Lewis is currently serving a life sentence for his role in the assassination of the SA Communist Party leader, in April 1993, and has repeatedly been denied parole.
Hani’s murder sparked riots and threatened to derail the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.
De Kock who was nicknamed “Prime Evil” was the former commander of the Vlakplaas police unit, who has spent more than 20 years at a high-security Pretoria prison.
In 1996, he was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment for the murders of six men.
He was sentenced to a further 212 years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit murder, culpable homicide, kidnapping, assault, and fraud.
His testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the brutal activities of police in the dying days of Apartheid made headlines around the world. These included kidnapping, torturing and murdering anti-apartheid activists.
Following his testimony in the late 1990s, he was granted amnesty for some of the crimes, but denied amnesty for other crimes.
In a radio interview in 2007, he claimed that F.W. De Klerk, the country’s last white president, had ordered political killings, and that his hands were “soaked in blood”.
