An introduction exchange took place with the Sunday Times. However, prior to that I had also received some emails from another newspaper journalist by the name of Yogas Nair from Daily News asking me to provide exclusive information about the Cato manor case. (20/02/2012)
After consideration and knowing from past experience that Daily News was compromised and captured by Booysen and the SAPS in KwaZulu-Natal, I refused to become the source for Daily News.
In 2012 Dr. Mary Rainer of Amnesty International, a specialist colleague of hers, and Stephan Hofstatter visited me in Greece where they interviewed my wife and I over a two-day period.
Amnesty International wanted to profil us and decide if they would support and provide us with further assistance. I am grateful to Amnesty International and especially to Dr. Mary Rainer as her counselling, support and compassion helped us pull through those difficult times that whistleblowers go through after suffering retaliation once they make public disclosures. As part of a safety protocol, we had to relocate every two years to a new location and Amnesty provided crucial assistance .
I would also like to make a special thanks to Stephan Hofstatter and his colleagues at the Sunday Times for their professionalism in reporting accurately and ethically on my story.
At the same period of time and after considerable email exchanges and calls, I was visited in Greece by investigator officers from SAPS and the NPA in order to provide them help and evidence regarding the Cato Manor case. There were three visits that took place, between 2012 and 2016. All meetings took place in the South African embassy in Athens. Audio recordings of these meetings are available .
Fake news attack campaign against me via South African media
The fake news attack against me started with a Daily News article that was published in October 2012 disclosing that I was “poised“ to be used as a key witness in the Cato Manor case and I suspected that Booysen must have found out around that time that I was a witness against him, and that he leaked this information to the media in order to discredit me. I say this because in this article Booysen turned on me in public for the first time. For example, Booysen is quoted in the article as saying that I had left South Africa because I had swindled investors, which is a blatant lie.
Incidentally the journalist who wrote this article in October 2012, Yogas Nair, was the same journalist that had asked me seven months earlier on to provide her with an exclusive on the Cato Manor story, which I refused to do so. A year later she further published fake news about me, in all fairness she did give me the right of reply.
Currently, Yogas Nair is an internal Press Ombudsman working for the discredited media group, Independent Media.
In February 2013 the Sunday Times published its first articles about me. The information the newspaper published, based on my own evidence, was accurate and true and I stand by it. There was nothing fake about it and I have all the evidence included within this website, to support what I told the newspaper. My evidence has never been tested in a court of law.
Very soon after the Sunday Times articles about me came out I received an email from the same reporter, Yogas Nair from Daily News, that I had refused to provide the inside story about the Cato Manor unit. She claimed that she was in possession of a statement from an African Woman who claimed that I was a member of a specialized police unit in 1998 that was involved with the shooting of her son. It was strange I thought, since I only applied to become a police reservist in late 1999 and I started active duty in 2001. Furthermore, the African woman that made this false statement against me just happened to be the domestic worker of Booysen for over 10 years!
As a result of above, the article “He killed my son” was published in March 2013 together with my reply. IOL often moves the page, here is the updated link to my rely that has been changed.
Clearly Booysen was behind this fake story as he made false comments in that article and the person reporting it was Booysen’s domestic worker for a decade. I immediately recognised the pattern of character assassination via fake news media. The idea behind it was that If Booysen circulated a fake news story, implicating me in a police shooting involving a civilian losing his life as a result of such action, my credibility as a State witness would have been damaged. Furthermore creating a conspiracy theory ( Booysen), that I was involved in an unjustified shooting incident involving a killing, was the only legal way for Booysen to have me extradited to South Africa from an EU country, in order to harm me further and silence me. He was getting desperate and sloppy. Cleary the whole thing was concocted against me just because I come forward to disclose wrongdoing against members of the police force. After all I was never in the police force in 1998 when the shooting incident occurred!
There were two articles published regarding the above false allegations against me, and although I was given a right of reply that proved the story was a fabrication by Johan Booysen, Daily News chose to break the link of the published story and my reply, in a deliberate attempt to stigmatise my name further, since when you Google my name, the headline “He killed my son” comes up! I wrote to Daily News demanding that they retract this fabricated story; however, they are notorious for publishing fake news for their own agendas.
I am puzzled to this day why the NPA did not follow up with such a serious obstruction of justice and connect the dots. A simple questioning of Booysen’s domestic worker would have made it clear that Booysen was behind it and together with his own domestic worker committing a serious criminal offence – that of fabricating false allegations and interfering with a witness in a criminal case against him. The very fact that there was no mention of this incident in Booysen’s book “Blood on their Hands” and that he never mentioned it again demonstrates to me that this was a plot to character assassinate me with fake news.