BBC tells Park Station bomber's story

29 August 2016 - 08:56 By ©The Daily Telegraph

British television's Channel4 broadcast a documentary about Johannesburg train bomber John Harris at the weekend. The Good Terrorist told of how white anti-apartheid activist Harris bombed a crowded platform at Park Station in 1964, killing a 77-year-old woman and leaving her granddaughter with third-degree burns.Harris was hanged, leaving behind a wife and a son who was too young to have any memory of his father.Harris's now grown-up son David was filmed tearfully travelling from his home in England to the station into which his father strode with a dynamite-packed suitcase five decades ago.The documentary featured Labour politician Peter Hain, who, as a teenager in South Africa, knew Harris, and spoke of the shock he had felt upon learning of the bombing.An opposite perspective was expressed by the survivor of the attack, Glynnis Burleigh. Just 12 at the time, she is now a 60-something woman living under an assumed name in Britain.A world away from the racial turmoil of '60s South Africa, she has accepted her disfigurements but not, the documentary suggested, John Harris's actions. ..

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