Tangeni Amupadhi
One of eight policemen being investigated for killing Josiah “Fingers” Rabotapi two weeks ago has admitted wrong-doing in the death of a suspect.
Henry Beukes, who has been the subject of investigation for at least three murders of suspects in his 22-year career, acknowledged in 1994 he used more than necessary force in the arrest of Fana Cindi.
Cindi was shot in the back while allegedly attempting to scale a wall. A neighbour testified at the inquest that he saw a policeman – matching Beukes’s description – placing a firearm in the dead suspect’s hand.
Beukes was one of the policemen who arrested Rabotapi, one of South Africa’s most wanted fugitives, in Soweto. The policemen took him to a Sandton flat where they shot the handcuffed gangster after he allegedly pulled a gun on them.
The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) deputy director for special investigations, Julian Snitcher, said this week Beukes was not in the room when Rabotapi was shot.
“That’s the information we received … There seems to be a perception that he was present during the shooting,” said Snitcher.
Police would not comment on the Rabotapi case until the ICD has completed its investigation.
In the Cindi inquest in 1993, the magistrate ruled the policemen had acted lawfully. However, the same officers “admitted liability” for Cindi’s death in a civil suit a year later.
According to Mosh Thulare, the attorney in the civil suit, Beukes and his colleagues changed their story several times during the four days before the start of the trial. The state finally decided to settle out of court.
“Something dramatic happened in the course of the trial,” Thulare recalled this week.
“Prior to the trial we requested to have sight of the policemen’s pocket diaries, in particular their entry on the day’s shooting.
“On or about the second day, the state attorney who represents the police advised us that his clients refused on the basis the diaries are protected by state privilege,” he said.
The state then made an offer of settlement without admitting liability but it was rejected.
When Thulare and his team were about to make an application to compel the police to hand over the diaries, they were told the pocket diaries had been stolen from the state attorney’s office.
On the fourth day, before Beukes was to testify, the state attorney made a substantially increased monetary offer of settlement with admission of the wrongful killing of Cindi.
“The admission meant they had acted unlawfully, they did not use reasonable force,” says Thulare.
“That admission meant there was ground for criminal prosecution despite [the fact that] the inquest found [them] to have acted within the law.”
The state paid about R49 000 to Cindi’s children for potential loss of income. The state also paid Cindi’s wife, Nonhlanhla, and his neighbour, Isaac Motloung, R30 000 each because the policemen had assaulted them.
For the past two weeks, Beukes and his colleagues have refused to be interviewed by the ICD on the Rabotapi killing, but have submitted written statements through their lawyers.
Snitcher has blamed the policemen’s “limited co-operation” with the ICD largely on the media attention the Rabotapi case has attracted.
Rabotapi sustained three bullets wounds, but Snitcher would not elaborate. More results from the state’s pathologist and the ballistics expert are awaited.