Hunting the Seven by Beverley Roos-Muller

ISBN: 9781776193509

Publisher: Jonathan Ball, May 2024

Paperback, 256 pages

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were part of a ‘terrorist’ MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987. A second inquest in 1989 again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having planned and executed the cold-blooded killings. Yet their real agenda remained a mystery.

In Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case and her search for the truth of their deaths, which has been shrouded in lies and mystery. Sifting through the evidence, and interviewing many of those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and behind it lay a shocking secret.