EBRAHIM Asvat, brother of the slain Indian doctor and anti-apartheid activist Dr Abu-Baker Asvat, has put his faith in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Like others who have testified during the special TRC hearing into the activities of the Mandela United Football Club, he is looking to the panel to help reveal the truth about his brother's murder in 1989.
At the start of his submission on December 1, Asvat said his family never believed robbery was the motive for the murder. He accused the police of failing to investigate the murder properly and suggested that the police, the previous government and the ANC were guilty "of a serious cover-up". Thulani Dlamini, who was convicted of murdering the doctor, told the police after his arrest that he had been offered money by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela for the murder. This statement was never produced in court, and Asvat said on December 3 that his family had never received an explanation for why it was excluded as evidence in court. The police had only told them that they "did not want to pursue that line", he said.
Asvat said the prosecutor at the trial gave him a copy of the statement, saying cryptically: "This statement may become helpful some time in the future." Asvat said the smuggling to Zambia of Katiza Cebekhulu, a key witness and co-accused in the Stompie Seipei kidnapping and murder trial, pointed to a coverup. Cebekhulu claimed in Fred Bridgland's book Katiza's Journey that he was instructed by Winnie to show Dlamini and another person the whereabouts of Asvat's surgery.
Relying heavily on Bridgland's book, Asvat has asked for details on the "volcanic row" which it alleges erupted between his brother and Winnie on January 27, 1989—after he allegedly refused to give her a certificate to con-firm Cebekhulu had been sodomised by the Rev Paul Verryn. But later a key witness testified that if Winnie and Dr Asvat had had a row on the day the doctor was murdered, she had not heard it. Nor had she seen Winnie at the surgery on the day he was murdered. And as various versions are bandied around, Ebrahim has a long struggle ahead as he seeks justice for his brother's death.
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