internal wing of the then-banned African National Congress (ANC). As a result of the three's disappearance, the Consumer Boycott Committee organised a huge consumer boycott which began in July 1985. Although it was strongly suspected that the Security Police had something to do with the three activists' disappearance, nothing was known of their fate until November 1997. The confession On 11 November, former Security Police Officer Colonel Gideon Nieuwoudt, while applying for amnesty during a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing, confessed to participating in the beating, robbery, and murder of the PEBCO Three. According to his testimony, Nieuwoudt lured the three men by having a paid police informant pose as a British embassy official interested in providing a cash donation to PEBCO call Sipho Hashe at his home. The informant convinced Sipho and his two friends to come to the airport to pick up the donation. (Nieuwoudt later refused to name the informant for fear of his safety.) The three men were apprehended by members of the Security Police and taken to an abandoned police station on a farm at Post Chalmers, near Cradock. They were then interrogated, stripped of their possessions, beaten, sedated, and finally strangled. The bodies were burned and the remains were thrown into the nearby Fish River. Eugene de Kock a former head of section C1 at the Vlakplaas farm north of Pretoria where many of these atrocities occurred – in his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) about the death of the PEBCO Three – admits to this and writes that in late 1985 there began an altercation between two members of his Vlakplaas team, sergeant Joe Mamasela and warrant officer Gert Beeslaar who had been involved in an operation in Port Elizabeth in which the PEBCO Three were murdered. The court case Also incriminated in the case were former policemen Johan Martin Van Zyl and Johannes Koole. Van Zyl voluntarily surrendered to police in Port Elizabeth on 11 February 2004. He had been out of the country on murder and three counts of assault to do grievous bodily harm. The trial was set for 12 October but has since been postponed by the defence, pending aTruth and Reconciliation Commission review of the 1989 Motherwell Bombing in which Nieuwoudt was also involved. The TRC refused to grant amnesty to the three perpetrators Van Zyl, Nieuwoudt and Lotz, citing that the three had failed