More than eight years after the university lecturer and anti-apartheid campaigner, Mr David Webster, was shot dead outside his Johannesburg home, a man has been arrested on suspicion of murdering him. Mr Ferdi Barnard, a member of the secret Civil Co-operation Bureau, founded by the old South African Defence Force to harass and "eliminate" anti-apartheid activists, is in police custody. A former policemen who was convicted of murdering two suspected drug dealers in the 1980s, Mr Barnard is scheduled to appear in court today.
The killing of Mr Webster in 1989, like the death in detention of Steve Biko in 1977 and the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, remains deeply etched in the public mind. It galvanised public opinion against state-sanctioned death squads during the last years of white minority rule.
Mr Barnard has refused to apply to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty. But he has long been a prime suspect in the Webster killing: he was named as the alleged killer by several witnesses during the long inquest in 1992 into Mr Webster's death. But the judge ruled that his culpability had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, a conclusion which echoed the earlier finding of the presiding judge in a judicial investigation into politically motivated murders.
Two developments seem to have led to Mr Barnard's arrest: first, the establishment of a special team under a provincial attorney-general to investigate "third force" murders - those carried out by police or military agents - and, second, a sworn affidavit by Mr Barnard's former mistress declaring that he had told her in a detailed account how he had murdered Mr Webster.
The attorney-general, Mr Jan D'Oliviera, is the man who marshalled the state case against Eugene de Kock, the former police colonel who was sentenced to life imprisonment last year for his role in political assassinations.