Families believe plane crash was apartheid crime

Nearly 60 years after her father boarded a South African Airways (SAA) plane from Port Elizabeth that crashed into the sea, Robyn Lichter still cannot say how he died or where his remains lie. Nor why one of South Africa’s most enduring aviation mysteries continues. 

She was just 11 when her father, prominent Johannesburg businessman Joseph Blankfield was among 20 passengers and five crew aboard the Vickers Viscount “Rietbok” that plunged into the Indian Ocean near Kayser’s Beach, outside East London, on 13 March 1967. 

Officially, no bodies were found. The aircraft wasn’t recovered. No definitive cause of the crash was ever established. 

Four of the passengers were Jewish, Blankfield, Audrey Rosenthal, Max Melmed, and Norman Sosnow. 

On Friday, 4 September, Melbourne-based Lichter, 71, stood before the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into stopped Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigations and prosecutions, and tried once again to highlight the murky details. 

She presented a detailed submission on behalf of the families of the 25 people aboard and that of SAA investigator Captain James Boyd, who died mysteriously shortly after the crash. 

“The last two years have spurred me to intense investigation that’s revealed the horrific truth of an apartheid crime. The handling of the bodies, no dignity for victims or families were haunting. I believe in our duty as Jews to bear witness and to keep their memory alive,” Lichter told the SA Jewish Report this week. 

“We don’t know what brought the plane down,” she said. “The incident was shrouded in secrecy; there were so many inconsistencies and irregularities, and files, documents, and recordings went missing. All we want is an investigation to uncover the truth.” 

“This was an apartheid-era crime and we, the victims’ family members, believe there was a definite cover-up.” 

She told the commission the families believe State Security was involved. 

Two passengers have become central to the theory that there was a cover-up. 

One was Professor Johannes Petrus van Schalkwyk Bruwer, African Affairs adviser, speechwriter, and close friend of prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and a senior figure in the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond. Verwoerd had been assassinated six months earlier. 

According to evidence gathered by the families and presented by Lichter, Bruwer had become increasingly “disillusioned” with apartheid and believed white minority rule could not endure. Lichter described him before the commission as wanting to redesign the social structure and perhaps the history of this country. 

The other passenger was Audrey Rosenthal. The Jewish American academic and anti-apartheid activist had been travelling clandestinely through South Africa, gathering information for the banned International Defence and Aid Fund, which supported political prisoners and their families. She was reportedly under surveillance. 

The presence of Rosenthal and Bruwer aboard the same small domestic flight has “fuelled suspicions” and forms part of the “body of circumstantial evidence which the families believe was never adequately investigated”, Lichter told the SA Jewish Report. 

For her, this sprawling mystery began with the most ordinary of family moments: going to the airport to fetch her father. 

Blankfield, a successful plastics manufacturer and co-founder of Bellavista School in Johannesburg, had travelled to Port Elizabeth on business and was coming home earlier than expected. Lichter, her mother Myra, 45, and brothers Mark, 15, and Paul, nine, climbed into her father’s new yellow Pontiac and drove from their Victory Park home to then Jan Smuts Airport. 

“I just remember waiting and waiting,” she said. “The flight was delayed. People were hovering around.” 

Eventually, the relatives were ushered into an office. 

“There was a bunch of us crammed into this office and they told us the plane had crashed. One woman collapsed, crying, distraught. Her daughter was on the plane. She felt so awful for us because we were so young.” 

They never gained any certainty about what had happened to Blankfield. 

“My mom, who was a very strong woman, remained tormented up until the day she died at 94, not knowing what happened to my father. 

“From the beginning, a shroud of silence was thrown over the investigation and all involved were sworn to secrecy,” said Lichter. 

“As a child, when you haven’t got a body or answers, I used to dream my dad would walk through the door and say, ‘I’ve sorted it all out. Don’t worry, I swam and got home.’” 

The official inquiry, headed by Justice Cecil Margo, couldn’t determine the cause of the crash, although it said it could not exclude the possibility that Captain Benjamin Lipawsky had suffered a heart attack and control of the aircraft was lost. 

There was no black box. 

“Although this event has been portrayed as a tragic accident, too many unexplained suspicious occurrences led the families and many others to believe something more sinister took place,” Lichter said in her affidavit. 

Among the most disturbing concerns were the victims themselves. Lichter told the commission that information on the night of the crash indicated an official report stating that 21 bodies had been found. There were numerous reports to this effect, she said, before the account changed and families were told no bodies had been recovered. 

At least two families, including Bruwer’s, were allegedly contacted and told to come and identify their loved ones, only to be turned away. 

Other disturbing accounts followed: a torso reportedly washed ashore, underwent a post-mortem, and was buried in an unmarked grave; another badly damaged body reportedly washed up in Queensbury Bay; and a third, believed to be that of British Jewish passenger Norman Sosnow, 23, was reportedly found floating off the East London coast, with no official documentation indicating what then happened to his remains. 

Former naval personnel claimed the aircraft itself had been located. A former navy diver later said the wreck was found and an underwater camera showed passengers still strapped into their seats. 

The official record said that very little wreckage was recovered and the main wreck could not be reached. 

Former Security Branch policeman and author Alan Elsdon alleged that the disaster was “the result of calculated foul play, deliberately obscured by the government”. His allegations remain unproven, but his affidavit is among material relied upon by those seeking a renewed investigation. 

None of these strands, individually or collectively, proves sabotage. What they do, the families argue, is demonstrate why the Rietbok crash cannot simply be consigned to history as a settled aviation accident. 

Lichter told the commission her hope was for the crash to be recognised as an apartheid-era crime and for the case to be referred to a dedicated prosecutor at the National Prosecuting Authority.