WILLEM JOHANNES VAN DER MERWE
I hear what you say Chairperson, I would like to state that it was 11 years ago and since I left the Force and I can't everything as clear but what I can remember, and perhaps I should just say that how we worked, we had teams and they had certain offices and they worked in the field to gather information and there we had for example Koos van der Berg and Matthew Sehlwana and they were working in their area of Botswana right up to the border and sometimes across the border.  And I can remember during May '86 , Brigadier Nick Coetsee told me that there was information that there were people who wanted to come in from Botswana.  They wanted to cross the border into the Republic.
	Now this kind of information, and we really suffered under the fact that there were so many illegal immigrants from the North in the country and we had to sift when we got information of this nature to determine whether it was clean, illegal immigrants or were they perhaps terrorists under the cover of immigrants.  But during may via Sehlwana and Koos van der Berg and Brigadier Coetsee, I got information that there were possibly three people who wanted to come in and they asked for assistance with regard to crossing points and transport into the Republic from Botswana.
	Now usually we do a follow-up on the information and then as it develops and then also the seniors in the structure are also then informed about the information. 
	I could perhaps summarise it by saying that this information continued.  It was monitored by these people and these three people wanted to come in, and at some stage, I think it could perhaps be in June, it seemed as if because of what was said by the contact person to our informer in Botswana, that these people spoke Afrikaans and he noticed that they were speaking Afrikaans and he thought that they could be people who actually originated in South Africa.   Then the suspicion was created that it could perhaps be terrorists who wanted to come in, and keeping that in mind the necessary attention was given to this case and it came to a stage where these people specifically asked that they be assisted with transport from the border into the country.
	At this stage we had reason to believe that these would be insurgents of a political nature.  We treated it as such and then we came to a point where a specific date was given.  Now I'm making an apology for the fact that I can't remember the specific date but it was in June that it was planned that these three would come through and that they would need transport. We then planned that as Security Branch members we would get a vehicle that we would give to Sehlwana which he would use to transport the people.