Johannesburg - President Cyril Ramaphosa has reacted to the passing of apartheid minister Adriaan Vlok, who died aged 85 on Sunday.
Ramaphosa said Vlok was charged with and found guilty of some of the apartheid atrocities for which he was accused.
"Vlok was charged and was found guilty for his attempted murder of Frank Chikane and was given a suspended sentence. That is how the justice system, in the end, liberated and concluded the matter.
"Of course, there are many other crimes and many other people who still need to account. Some of those have been taken up by the families and the state, and government itself needs to continue taking those up. The decision taken is that we are going to be doing that. The ministry of justice is looking at all that, and that processing is also going to get underway," he said.
Ramaphosa added that matters would not be swept under the carpet and would be dealt with openly without any fear or favour.
"Things are not going to be swept under the carpet, and as a democratically elected government, so those processes will unfold. Obviously, as I said, things which I bemoan is that things take rather too long to happen. Even with the crimes that happened during the World War, there are people who are still charged and prosecuted to this day, and some of them are as old as 80 years old, but they are still being pursued," Ramaphosa told Newzroom Afrika on Monday.
On social media, Vlok’s death has been received with mixed feelings following his reputation as the feared minister who engineered and entrenched the brutal nature of the apartheid regime and his involvement in some of the atrocities committed against black South Africans.
Vlok received a 10-year suspended sentence in 2007 for attempting to murder and kill reverend Chikane, an ANC member at the time.
At the time of this attempted murder, Vlok was the then head of a leading anti-apartheid organisation who tried to rub poison on the clothes and luggage of reverend Chikane 18 years earlier at Johannesburg airport.
Vlok was the former Law and Order Minister who oversaw a brutal police crackdown on opponents of the repressive white rule.
"He died in the early hours of Sunday morning in the Unitas Hospital in Centurion following a short illness," a family spokesperson said in a statement.
In the late 1980s, Vlok presided over the bomb squads that killed and injured people, churches, and members of trade unions.
He is quoted as openly saying: "I believed that apartheid was right. It was our job to make people fear us," he told AFP in 2015.