Family member says Mark Minnie’s death ‘definitely’ not suicide

A relative of Mark Minnie, Tersia Dodo, told the SABC on Wednesday that she did not believe Minnie committed suicide, saying his life was in danger and that she believed the suicide note found at the scene either to be false or not exist at all.

“My reaction was that it was definitely not a suicide, and it’s the same reaction that we all have had,” she said of Minnie’s family.

“This supposed suicide note was either written under duress [or forged], and I would like to see it before I will believe that it was written by Mark.”

Later in the interview, Dodo mentioned that the alleged suicide note had not been seen by anyone other than the police.

“I don’t believe that a suicide note exists at this stage.”

“I spoke to a couple of my cousins today, and to all of them, he expressed that his life was in danger, and that if anything did happen to him, we must know that it was done to him, not by himself,” Dodo said.

Police said the death was still being treated as an inquest.

While it was initially reported that no foul play was suspected in the death of The Lost Boys of Bird Island co-author, News24 reported Minnie and co-author Chris Steyn had received threats after the book’s publication and had been “living in fear”.

Police spokesperson Captain Johan Rheeder later also told the website the firearm with which Minnie allegedly took his own life had not been his.

READ MORE: Elite ring of apartheid paedophiles allegedly preyed on coloured boys

The latest reports said the owner of the firearm, a friend of Minnie’s, could be charged with negligence.

The two authors reportedly refused to have a traditional book launch and feared for their safety to the point of not wanting to appear in public.

Minnie reportedly met a source on Friday, and was meant to meet another one on Monday.

While Steyn confirmed Minnie’s death, she was apparently too traumatised to say anything about what might have caused it.

Minnie and Steyn had allegedly been investigating several leads subsequent to the book’s publication, but were afraid to publish what they had discovered.

Minnie and Steyn’s book, The Lost Boys of Bird Island, exposes an alleged paedophile ring, implicating two powerful apartheid officials and a businessman.

Since its release, some of Malan’s former colleagues as well as a former newspaper editor have rejected the book’s claims of the apartheid politicians’ involvement in the sexual abuse.

The book tells of “fishing excursions” organised by former minister Magnus Malan, wealthy businessman and police reservist Dave Allen – who died in an apparent suicide at the age of 37 – and National Party environmental affairs minister John Wiley – who also died at 80 by alleged suicide weeks after Allen was found dead with similar gunshot wounds to the head.

On these “fishing excursions” by apartheid government officials, the men were always accompanied by young boys, and a book coming out today reveals why: the boys were given food and booze just before they would be abused in sex orgies.

The boys were flown out on helicopters belonging to the then SA Defence Force (SADF), and the connection becomes clear once one understands that one of the men implicated in this elite ring of paedophiles was the minister of defence, a man who was at the time one of the powerful men in the country, possibly second only to then president PW Botha.

According to the book, the boys were mostly coloured and the rest white, and they were in their early teens. In one gruesome incident, a coloured boy was critically injured when Malan, according to sources, stuck a pistol up the boy’s anus and fired a shot. The child was secretly taken to the white side of a government hospital, guarded by men in suits. Family members and hospital staff were paid to keep quiet.

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