Thomas Vorster

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Thomas Vogel Vorster is a former intelligence official during the apartheid era in South African history. In 2002, he was arrested following the death of a woman in the Soweto bombings at the end of that year.

Prior to the end of apartheid, Vorster had served in the South African military and the intelligence services. According to some sources, he served in a secret unit of the South African army called the Directorate of Covert Collections, which was alleged to have carried out assassinations. [1] He later worked as a businessman in Pretoria.

The reason for his arrest was his alleged involvement with the Boeremag, a white supremacist terrorist organisation which police accused of the bombings, and of plotting to overthrow the government. He was alleged to be the leader of a regional faction of this group. The details of the alleged plot were contained in "Document 12", which was reportedly handed over to the police by an army officer. The document described a plot involving 3,772 men, which aimed to create a white nation in South Africa. It included details of methods such as freeing convicted apartheid-era killers, seizing military bases and blowing up dams. [2]

However, police stressed that they had established no direct link between the Boeremag and the Warriors of the Boer Nation, a second group which had claimed responsibility for the bombings. [3] Nonetheless, Vorster was accused, along with 23 others, of charges relating to these events. In what many saw as retaliation for Vorster's arrest, another bomb was exploded on a bridge.

As details of the alleged plot to overthrow the ANC emerged, as well as the trial of Vorster and other Boeremag members, these were greeted with amusement in certain sections of the African media, due to the grandiose nature of their apparent goals, the mysticism, prophecies and religious ideology which they reportedly used to justify their doings, and the methods they supposedly planned to use, which included marching all blacks out of the country and throwing poisoned oranges into the streets of Soweto, a plot known as Operation Popeye. [4] It was also claimed that Vorster planned to keep a group of Afrikaner women locked in the Armscor building, where they would be artificially inseminated in order to start a new nation.