The Bomb in the Station But the arrests of the
Liberals are not all. There is the peculiar affair of the bomb planted in Johannesburg station on July 24. Side by side with stories of the search for Vigne and of further Liberal arrests has been the story that a white man was seen placing the bomb. This is a deliberate attempt by the South African authori- ties to smear the Liberal Party by associating it in people's minds with a particularly nasty and senseless form of violence. There is no evidence that the Liberal Party has ever condoned this kind of activity. The incident, however, has played right into the Government's hands, so much so in fact that there is a strong belief that the Government must have known of it in advance. It is a very strange, fact that within ninety minutes of the explosion the police were marching into the railway station journalist detainees and forcing them to look at the blood and damage. The affair goes on, with no one quite knowing who is arrested and who is free. Meanwhile, we might expect to see in this country the kind of public outcry which deservedly greeted the trial of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues.
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