Butana Almond Nofomela

Butana Almond Nofomela (born 1957) is a former South African security policeman. In 1989 when under sentence of death for murder, he confessed to membership of a police assassination squad that killed and terrorized opponents of apartheid. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was released on parole in 2009.

Nofomela was sentenced to death in 1988 after being convicted of the murder of a white farmer, Johannes Lourens.

On the evening of 19 October 1989, Nofomela made a confession from his death row cell in Pretoria, just hours before he was due to go to the gallows. He announced that he had information to disclose about his membership from 1980 in a death squad operated by the South African Security Police. His execution was stayed for an investigation into his allegations. He gave accounts of torture and murder that took place at the notorious Vlakplaas police farm. Nofomela identified a retired captain in the security police, Dirk Coetzee, as his old commander. Coetzee, who was hiding in Europe, confirmed that he had led one of five "hit squads" run out of a restricted police base at Vlakplaas near Pretoria.

Nofomela said he was one of seven men who raided a suspected safe house of members of the ANC in Swaziland late in 1983, using a hand grenade and automatic weapons. Three guerrillas were killed and one wounded in the raid. In another affidavit he stated that in November 1981, he helped kill Griffiths Mxenge, a Durban human rights lawyer said to have links to the outlawed African National Congress, and made the murder appear as a robbery. He also said that Captain Coetzee had told him he might be needed to kill the victim’s wife, Victoria Mxenge; she was shot and axed to death in August 1985. Coetzee's, Tshikalange's and Nofomela's statements all corroborated one another. Nofomela also gave an account of an incident in Lamontville in which a police hit squad killed some guerillas of the ANC in late 1985. John Dugard, a law professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, said an identical incident occurred in Chesterville in 1986 in which four members of a youth organization were slain.

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