Pretorius Leonie

Age 14. Leonie Pretorius was killed in a politically motivated insurgent assault on 19 December 1992 at Danside Farm, located in the Ficksburg district of the Orange Free State province, near the border with Lesotho. The attack occurred around midnight while Leonie was watching television in the living room with her brother and a friend. Operatives from the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), targeted the remote border farmstead as part of their armed rural campaign.The attackers surrounded the homestead, launched a hand grenade through the living room window, and fired multiple rounds of live ammunition directly into the room. The explosion and subsequent gunfire severely wounded Leonie Pretorius, along with five other individuals inside the house. The assailants quickly retreated on foot across the border into the neighboring kingdom of Lesotho. Emergency teams responded to the farmstead, but Leonie Pretorius succumbed to her severe fragmentation and gunshot injuries approximately three hours after the attack.Following the incident, police trackers verified the cross-border escape route, and targeted operations eventually led to the arrest of the APLA operatives involved. In the post-apartheid legal transition, the perpetrators applied for political indemnity before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Under TRC amnesty decision AC/1999/0182, the legal dockets and murder charges were formally expunged when the applicants were officially granted amnesty on the grounds that the farm invasion was authorized as part of APLA's liberation struggle, leading to their subsequent release from custody.