Former Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize has said attempts to implicate him in the murder of Gauteng Health whistleblower Babita Deokaran were aimed at politically embarrassing him, and he has strongly denied any knowledge of the assassination.
One of the men accused of killing Deokaran told the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday he’d implicated Mkhize in the murder only after a night of “torture”.
In his bail affidavit read out by his lawyer, Advocate Peter Wilkins, Phakamani Hadebe, 29, said a brutal interrogation by the police officers who had arrested him finally led to a false confession implicating Mkhize in the murder, reports News24.
Deokaran, 53, a witness in a Special Investigating Unit investigation into PPE tender fraud amounting to more than R300m, was shot and killed in her car outside her home in Winchester Hills on 23 August.
Hadebe was arrested on Thursday, 26 August 2021, in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, by what he described as “a sizeable contingent of police personnel”.
In his affidavit he said that when he persistently denied any involvement in the murder, he was punched in the stomach and assaulted, and at one stage a policeman sat on his back, and pulled a plastic bag tightly around his face so he could not breathe.
“I was suffocated … between questions and accusations for about an hour,” he said, adding that during the interrogation, he was shown photos of people, and police allegedly told him, “… they knew that our former health minister, Zweli Mkhize”, had hired [him] and “the others to kill [Deokaran]”.
He said at one point, the accusation included an allegation that Mkhize was accompanied by his brother.
Hadebe said: “To be clear, I have not ever met our former health minister Mkhize, nor any brother of his.”
Eventually, he told the court, he thought he was going to die so he had implicated Mkhize to end the torture. “I admitted to the accusations that had been levelled against me, including that Mkhize and his brother had hired me and the others to commit the murder.” The bail application for Hadebe and his co-accused will continue on Friday.
In a statement on Wednesday, reports BusinessLIVE, Mkhize said he was shocked that his name had been dragged into the case and that it was an attempt to cause him political embarrassment.
He said he wanted to assure Deokaran’s family that he had nothing to do with the callous crime, “nor the alleged procurement irregularities which are believed to have driven it”.
“It should be remembered that these alleged procurement irregularities took place at a provincial level, far away from the national sphere of government where I was deployed as a national minister of health.”
Mkhize said he had instructed his lawyers to write to the Independent Police Independent Directorate (Ipid) “to investigate the circumstances surrounding the extraction and acceptance into evidence of the reported ‘confession’ whose value could only have been to cause him political embarrassment”.
BusinessLive article – Zweli Mkhize distances himself from Deokaran murder (Open access)
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Speculation of Gauteng 'Mafia' link to murder of Babita Deokaran
Gauteng Health whistleblower’s assassination was meticulously plotted
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