A former South African security police captain says he commanded an assassination team created to track down and eliminate opponents of the Government. The former officer, Capt. Dirk Johannes Coetzee, who quit the police in 1986 and left South Africa last week, made the statement in an interview in Mauritius with a reporter for Vrye Weekblad, an Afrikaans-language weekly newspaper. The paper published the story in its current issue.
On Friday, Maj. Gen. Herman Stadler of the South African police said Mr. Coetzee's ''unfounded, untested and wild'' allegations would be investigated by T. P. McNally, the Attorney General of the Orange Free State, and Lieut. Gen. Alwyn Conradie, head of the police criminal investigation division.The police said Mr. Coetzee had made his accusations in a foreign country where they could not be verified. It also said he had been dishonorably discharged in 1986 for criminal misconduct. Vrye Weekblad said Mr. Coetzee, who is 44 years old, had left the force ''for health reasons after a departmental inquiry.'' Corroboration by Doomed Killer
A few weeks ago, Butana Nofomela, a convicted murderer awaiting hanging in Pretoria, asserted that he served as a member of the hit squad and named Captain Coetzee as his operational commander. His execution was stayed so his assertions could be investigated. Mr. Coetzee confirmed that Mr. Nofomela had served under him. ''I was the commander of the assassination squad of South African police,'' the newspaper quoted Mr. Coetzee as saying. ''My men and I killed and eliminated opponents of the Government.'' He said he was guilty of, or an accomplice to several murders.
Mr. Coetzee said the security police operation had five squads, including his, and had carried out attacks in Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Britain, as well as inside South Africa. ''We operated in civilian dress and were armed with the strangest weaponry and explosive devices,'' the newspaper quoted him as saying. ''We operated underground and were not recognizable as policemen.''
Some opponents of apartheid have insisted that the police were behind the killing of a number of Pretoria's adversaries, among them members of the outlawed African National Congress living in exile. The police have consistently denied the existence of any such ''hit squads,'' and General Stadler reiterated this denial on Friday.
Mr. Coetzee asserted that the operation was run from Vlakplaas, a restricted police training base near Pretoria, using former guerrillas from the African National Congress, nicknamed ''askaris,'' who had been recruited to fight their old comrades. Not for That Purpose The police confirmed on Friday that Mr. Coetzee had been stationed at Vlakplaas, but said that he had ''irresponsibly'' misidentified the base's purpose. ''The base was not open to the public because it houses former A.N.C. members, who are now proud South African policemen and citizens,'' the police statement said. ''They provide the force with valuable intelligence and also play a cardinal role in the identification of A.N.C. terrorists infiltrating South Africa,'' ''Their lives are constantly in jeopardy, and the base provided a safe haven for them,'' the statement said.
The former South African Police Commissioner, Gen. Johan Coetzee, told the South African Broadcasting Corporation today that the askaris were used to identify guerrillas trying to infiltrate through border posts with forged documents and were not involved in assassinations. General Coetzee, who is not related to Mr. Coetzee, said there were no ''hit squads.'' ''The police are there to maintain law and order,'' he added, ''and just the thought of such a squad would defeat all that the police stand for.''
The victims of his team, Mr. Coetzee said, included Griffiths Mxenge, a Durban lawyer stabbed to death in 1981. ''Yes, we killed Mxenge,'' the former officer was quoted as saying. He said the four killers each were paid 1,000 rand, now about $380. ''They assured me it looked like a robbery,'' he said. Guerrilla Targeted
On another assignment, Mr. Coetzee said, he was issued a Scorpion machine pistol concealed in a briefcase and ordered to kill Marius Schoon, an A.N.C. member living in Botswana. The mission was called off when other plans were made, he said. A letter bomb killed Mr. Schoon's wife, Jeanette, and young daughter in Angola in 1984.
Vrye Weekblad quoted Mr. Coetzee as relating other cases, in which he said captured guerrillas were drugged and shot with pistols fitted with silencers. Mr. Coetzee said his unit broke into the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Mbabane, Swaziland, and stole ''whatever we could find.'' One of the official envelopes they took, he said, was later used to mail the letter bomb that killed Ruth First in Maputo, Mozambique, in August 1982. She was the wife of Joe Slovo, who heads the South African Communist Party in exile.
Mr. Coetzee, who said he headed an assassination squad until 1982, told Vrye Weekblad: ''I decided to confess to cleanse my conscience. I think with contempt of the things that I did.''
Source: New York Times
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