Cape Town - Claims by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille that there had been a concerted police effort to arrest her have been rejected as “spurious claptrap” by one of two senior officers she implicated.
In her autobiography, Not Without A Fight, Zille claims the previous ANC administration in charge of the Western Cape had issued a “political instruction” to the SAPS to derail a “Save Democracy” march in October 2006.
Almost a year later, Jeremy Vearey was the station commander at the Mitchells Plain police station where Zille was arrested on Sunday, September 9, 2007, after an anti-drug march veered off the prescribed route. Vearey said he never arrested the then Cape Town mayor.
“What she has done (in her book) is StratComm, borrowed from the likes of (former apartheid police spy) Vic McPherson, where you take one event (her arrest) to add plausibility to a conspiracy theory.”
In her book, Zille claims that “a senior superintendent”, Stephanus Johannes Vorster, tipped her off about the conspiracy.
She identified Vearey and the Western Cape’s former crime intelligence head, Peter Jacobs, as “former Umkhonto we Sizwe operative(s)”.
Vearey denied he arrested Zille in 2007, but acknowledged he was present at the station during her arrest “in an office with her lawyer present”.
“What disappoints me about this web of nonsense is that she is a journalist who ought to know that she has to corroborate anonymous sources. I did not arrest her... I never read her her rights.
“I know who arrested her, I know why it happened and I take ultimate responsibility,” Vearey said.
Previously Zille claimed senior police officers were in cahoots with gangsters.
“There is a deliberate political strategy, involving high-ranking police officers and politicians, to ensure that gangs, drugs and crime continue to destabilise the Western Cape,” she claimed in one of her newsletters.
Asked about the incident at the Mitchells Plain police station in October 2007, Zille insisted that Vearey had arrested her. “He absolutely did. And I was later paid out for wrongful arrest.”
Cape Times