JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South Africa gave a convicted KGB assassin asylum and an assumed identity in a secret deal with the West German Security Service, a former police commissioner said in an interview.
Gen. Mike Geldenhuys, who retired last year as chief of the South African police, told the Rand Daily Mail that former Soviet hit-man Bogdan Stashinsky was supplied with a false identity and a job and underwent cosmetic surgery to change his appearance when he arrived in South Africa in 1968.
Stashinsky defected to the West in September 1961 and was sentenced in West Germany to eight years for killing Ukranian exiles Dr. Lev Rebet and Stefan Bandera in 1957 and 1959, Geldenhuys said.
He was released from prison in 1968.
'In the meantime, we were approached by the West German Security Service and asked to give this man asylum in South Africa because they were convinced it was the only country where he would be comparatively safe from KGB agents,' Geldenhuys told the newspaper.
'He was able to supply our intelligence service with a vast amount of invaluable information on the structure and operations of the Russian secret service,' he said.
