The Church Street Bomb Explosion, Friday 20 May 1983, Pretoria: A Personal Perspective
https://en.wikepedia.org/wiki/Church_Street_Pretoria_bombing
Wolfgang Witschas
Abstract
On Friday 20 May 1983, a major car bomb exploded outside the South African Air Force (SAAF) Headquarters in the Nedbank Square Building in Church Street Pretoria.
Introduction
The Church Street bombing was a terrorist car bomb attack on 20 May 1983 at 16:30 in Pretoria by uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. The bombing killed 19 people, including the two perpetrators, and wounded 217.
Cryptographers’ Course of the South African Communication Security Agency (SACSA): 02 to 20 May 1983: Pretoria
From Monday 02 to Friday 20 May 1983 my wife, Ellen, attended a three week long Cryptographer course that was presented at the Headquarters of the South African Air Force (SAAF) by the South African Communications Security Agency (SASCA). The course was attended by personal of the South African Defence Force(SADF), South African Police (SAP) Security Branch and the National Intelligence Service (NIS). Ellen was a member of NIS stationed at the NIS Regional office in Windhoek, then South West Africa (SWA).
Events on Friday 20 May 1983
On the last day of the Cryptographers course there were no exams, tests or lectures, just the normal closure of handing back all classified material, Security Identity Cards etc. and one last farewell tea break at 11:00. At around 12:00 that fateful day Ellen and two other members from NIS left the building and one of her colleagues, Deon Botes, gave her a lift to the Monria Apartment Hotel were she resided during the course. She was due to be taken to the then Jan Smuts International Airport to depart for Windhoek on the regular 16:00 SAA flight, by Waldo Prigge, a member of the NIS, stationed at the then Head Office in the Concillium Building in Skinner Street.
She departed on the 16:00 South African Airways (SAA) flight to Windhoek. The plane was airborne for about 30 minutes when the car bomb exploded at 16:30. The flight crew possibly received the news of the bomb explosion but did no communicated it to the passengers due to security reasons.
As the SAA flight from Johannesburg was due to land at the JG Srijdom International Airport outside Windhoek at about 18:00, I left the NIS office at the Berg Hotel in Klein Windhoek at 16:30. The airport is situated about 35 km east of Windhoek and on Friday afternoons the traffic on the Windhoek – Gobabis main road is quite heavy in both directions, especially with the incoming SAA flights from Cape Town (16:00) departing back to Cape Town at 17:00, the flight from Johannesburg at 18:00 and departing at 19:00 and the international fligh from Johannesburg via Windhoek to Frankfurt at 19:30.
At that stage I was not aware of any incident that had happened as I did not listen to the radio in the car. At the airport I met an SAA employee, Joe Van Eck, whom I knew very well. He was busy processing documentation of the departed Cape Town flight. When he came back from the main administration office he looked bewildered and said that there was a bomb explosion in Pretoria at a Military building in the afternoon. Not much detail was available.
After Ellen’s flight had landed and we were preparing to travel back to Windhoek, Joe van Eck came to us and said that the bomb explosion was in front of the SAAF Headquarters in Church Street Pretoria. Ellen went pale and said that is the same building where she had attended the course. This all came as a big shock once we realised the full impact of the incident.
Aftermath
We could barely believe that had the course not ended that day and all left around 12:00 the they could also have been part of the statistics of the people that died or were injured, as they usually left the building around 16:30 with the Air Force personnel. Was is luck, was it coincidence or was it destiny, that this group of people were not at the scene when the bomb exploded.
Will we ever know …
Helene Pastoors, one of the church Street bombers, 1983
References:
https://en.wikepedia.org/wiki/Church_Street_Pretoria_bombing
Personal account by Ellen and Wolfgang Witschas
Wolfgang Witschas is a former member of the South African Police (SAP 1976 – 1981)(Uniform & Detective Branch), a member of the National Intelligence Service (NIS 1981 -1994), National Intelligence Agency (NIA 1995 – 2008), and the State Security Agency (SSA Domestic Branch 2008 – 2016).
