from the inquest courts
Leading human rights lawyer George Bizos has written an account of inquests into the deaths of people who died in detention under apartheid. This is an edited extract from the book
After its passage through Parliament in 1963, the detention without trial law soon claimed its first victim. On August 20 1963, two months after the arrest of Walter Sisulu and others at a Rivonia farm, the police detained a 35-year-old Umkhonto weSizwe commander, Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle, on suspicion of ANC activities. During the night of September 4/5 1963, he was found hanged in the Pretoria North police cells, hundreds of miles away from his home in Cape Town. His widow, Beauty, heard of his death some 10 days later; by then her husband had already been buried.
Wanting answers, Beauty Nomulelo Ngudle went to attorney Joel Carlson. In his investigations, Carlson ran up against a wall of official silence. The prisons department could not supply information unless they knew when Ngudle was detained and where he had died. When Carlson tried to obtain this information from the security police, they denied all knowledge of the matter. And so it went on, as every state department referred Carlson back to the security police, and silence.
It was only when the inquest was scheduled that information eventually became available. In the interim, Carlson had interviewed a number of political prisoners who told him how detainees were tortured. Some of the prisoners told Carlson the security police had shown them Ngudle’s lifeless body as a warning.
In the mid-1990s, Govan Mbeki, then deputy president of the South African Senate, appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). A Rivonia trialist, Mbeki had been in Pretoria Central Prison while Ngudle was being held there and the two would occasionally pass each other on the exercise terrain. One day Ngudle dropped a note for Mbeki in which the detainee said that he was being tortured. A fellow senator of Mbeki’s, Christmas Tinto, who had been arrested a week before Ngudle, told the TRC that he saw Ngudle being beaten by policemen. “They were kicking and beating him as they went up the stairs.” Among those he saw beating Ngundle, Tinto named Sergeant “Spyker” van Wyk and Sergeant Greeff.
Evidence of torture was led at the inquest, but the magistrate was not interested. Counsel for the family was George Lowen, QC, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a senior advocate at the Johannesburg Bar. The flamboyant, suave Lowen brooked no nonsense and often informed magistrates of this, quite directly. His junior was Ernie Wentzel, a leading liberal who had himself been detained.
It was a difficult inquest, the security police doing their utmost to frustrate any possibility of the truth emerging. They brought Ngudle’s widow from the Cape and induced her to sign an affidavit that she had never briefed Carlson. Fearing this, Carlson had obtained a power of attorney from the widow and Ngudle’s elder brother, who was, according to African indigenous law, her legal guardian.
Not to be discouraged by the failure of this ploy, the government took the unprecedented step of banning a dead person. It was now illegal to quote the late Looksmart Ngudle. Lowen was outraged and decided to withdraw in protest.
Ernie later related the story of how Lowen couldn’t himself formally withdraw because he was busy arguing the invalidity of the indictment in the Rivonia Trial on behalf of James Kantor. When Ernie suggested that it wasn’t really necessary for Lowen to come to court and that he would withdraw instead, the older man responded, “Ernie, you don’t know how to withdraw properly.” Ernie spent the morning pacing the corridors of the Pretoria Magistrates’ Court, making all sorts of excuses to the magistrate for the absence of his senior and pleading with him to wait.
Lowen arrived at 2 o’clock, properly attired with hat and umbrella, with a prepared speech arguing that he could not do justice to the case if he could not quote. The next day photographs appeared in the newspapers of Lowen leaving the court, bristling with anger.
Perhaps embarrassed by this even cruder ploy, the government relented and permitted the use of statements by Ngudle at the inquest. But Lowen was not to continue. He suffered a heart attack and on his doctor’s orders withdrew from the matter. Vernon Berrang took charge of the case. Although he enjoyed the highest possible reputation as a trial lawyer in criminal cases, Berrang had never taken silk. The minister of justice would probably not have granted him the honour: he had been named as a communist. But Berrang would also have never given the minister the pleasure of refusing his application. All the same Berrang always behaved as a senior member of the Bar, insisting that a junior should be briefed with him.
The state prosecutor, one V Marinus, favoured by the security police for their cases, argued that Ngudle would have been charged with sabotage and his statements had incriminated his former comrades. Since he was facing death by hanging or revenge, suicide was his only way out.
Berrang took a different tack. He argued, on behalf of the family, that solitary confinement led to mental breakdown. There was nothing in Ngudle’s cell apart from a sleeping mat. He had had no reading materials, and was separated from other prisoners. His interrogators, who took him to their head office, were virtually the only people with whom he had had any contact. Detention was a sure way of breaking a person, Berrang argued. Thus, he concluded, if Ngudle did hang himself, he was driven to it by the police and the detention laws.
The district surgeon, Dr CJN Laubser, said he was satisfied Ngudle had died by hanging; he had found no other injuries on the body. This could not be contested. Because Ngudle had been buried for over a month, the family’s pathologist, Dr Hillel Shapiro, was unable to perform an independent autopsy and had to rely on the report of the state pathologist.
Berrang had a reputation as a fearsome cross-examiner. Major Fred van Niekerk of the security police was to experience this when questioned on his interrogation methods.
“If a detainee, this man or any other, on being interrogated after he had been detained, says, `I am not under any circumstances prepared to give you any information whatsoever,’ do you leave him alone or do you take further steps?”
“Well, he’s got to be asked again.”
“And again?”
“Yes.”
“And again?”
“Yes.”
“And again?”
“Yes.”
“And again?”
“Yes.”
“I see. The idea being to wear him down, I suppose?”
“I make no comment.”
Berrang returned to this point of infinite interrogation, when he asked the major, “That would be a dreadful thing to happen to a man, wouldn’t it, if in fact you were wrong?”
“Yes.”
“It would be, and all that man would be able to see, as far as his future is concerned, would be an endless vista of imprisonment coupled with repeated questioning.”
“Yes.”
Berrang called Isaac Tlale to testify that he had seen Ngudle at the police station. Ngudle, he said, had seemed in great pain. Questioned on his own treatment, Tlale told a harrowing tale of torture as the police tried to force him to admit to recruiting for Umkhonto weSizwe. After assaulting him, during which he still denied the allegations, the police told him to undress.
“Did you do so?” asked Berrange.
“I did so,” responded Tlale.
“And then where were you told to go?”
“I was handcuffed. There were two chairs joined together. I was asked to sit on those two chairs. I was sitting this way…” Tlale indicated how he had sat, with his knees up, his arms wrapped around them. “My hands were handcuffed,” he continued, “and in between my knees they inserted a broom handle.”
“Below your knees and above your arms?”
“Above my arms and below my knees.”
“So that you were pinioned then?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your head?”
“My head was covered with a bag.”
“And what happened to your hands?”
“I could feel that something was tied to my two small fingers.”
“And during this time you were being addressed. Were they talking to you, asking you anything?”
“They were asking me continuously whether I was still denying.”
“Did you continue to deny?”
“I continued denying.”
“What was the next thing you felt?”
“I then felt my body was burning. I felt as if something was shocking me.”
“Have you ever had an electric shock?”
“Yes, I had it when I was repairing a car.”
“The same sort of thing?”
“Yes.”
“Can you remember how many times these shocks were put through you?”
“They did it twice.”
“And what happened ultimately?”
“Thereafter I lost my consciousness. The next thing I remember was standing next to a table signing a document.”
“Did anyone hold your hand?”
“One constable was holding my hand.”
“Was this a document that had any writing on it? Or was it blank, or what was it?”
“I could see, on this piece of paper, on top was written my name and address.”
“And the rest, was it blank, or had it writing on it?”
“It was blank.”
“And the sheet of paper on which you signed your name? Was that the same sheet of paper, or can’t you remember?”
“It was not the paper which had my name on.”
“And thereafter where did you go?”
“They said I should go and clean myself.”
“Why did you have to go and clean yourself?”
“I had messed myself up.”
“You defecated into your trousers?”
“Yes. I was taken to a latrine. I took a piece of paper and wiped out my trousers.”
“And then you were taken back to your room?”
“Yes.”
But when Berrang tried to lead further evidence on the matter, the magistrate disputed its relevance. Counsel argued that he was trying to establish “a system, a technique of torture, used by certain members of the security branch, to extract information”. The magistrate was unimpressed – he ruled this irrelevant and Berrang withdrew in protest. He had tried to show that the only reasonable inference was that if Ngudle had killed himself, it was as a result of the treatment to which he had been subjected. And so the magistrate reached the first in a long series of findings at inquests – no one was to blame.
In many ways the Ngudle inquest was a template on which subsequent Security Police versions at inquests were modelled. The argument of suicide prompted by betrayal was hauled out time and again as the state sought to justify why apparently well-adjusted men would take their own lives. Berrang’s argument about the effects of detention would also resurface, some 18 years later, in the Aggett inquest. But the most resounding impact of the Ngudle inquest was the finding, which would echo down the years.
In 1969 Ahmed Timol was overseas receiving training as a member of the South African Communist Party. After his return to South Africa, he served not only as a teacher in a Roodepoort high school, but also as part of the underground. Along with Jeremy Cronin, Timol had been detailed to disseminate propaganda within South Africa. Unlike Cronin, he did not survive.
When Timol left his parents’ Roodepoort home one spring evening, he told them he was on the way to the cinema. It was the last time the Timols saw their son alive. That night, Friday October 22 1971, marked the beginning of a countrywide series of police raids, described as the most extensive since 1964.
At about 11pm, Ahmed and his companion, Mohamed Salim Essop, were stopped at a police roadblock in Coronationville. On searching the Anglia motor car, police discovered pamphlets belonging to the banned African National Congress and Communist Party. They promptly detained Timol and Essop, and turned them over to the security police. At 2.40pm on the next day, Saturday October 23, Timol was taken to John Vorster Square. What happened next is known only to the members of the police who interrogated Timol over the following days.
Timol’s family knew as little as anyone else. They expected their son back that Friday evening. Instead they found the security police at their door in the early hours of the next morning. They searched Ahmed’s bedroom, saying only, “We have your son,” as they left. The police paid a number of visits to the Timols. When they came again on the Tuesday afternoon prior to his death, Mrs Hawa Timol could bear it no longer. “I said: `My heart is so sore.’ I asked where my son was,” she recalled at the inquest.
When she asked why she could not see him, one policeman replied, “He needs a hiding.”
The shocked Mrs Timol responded, “I’ve never hurt my son, so you must not hit him.”
“Because you didn’t hit him, we will hit him,” was the policeman’s reply.
During the inquest, the policeman concerned, Warrant Officer Van Rensburg, claimed he had said, “Look, a child must get a hiding; if you had given him a hiding then you wouldn’t be crying now.”
The magistrate found Mrs Timol’s version of events unconvincing. It was not unusual for the courts to prefer the evidence of the security police.
The news of Timol’s death led to a public outcry and calls for an immediate investigation into the treatment of detainees. As Professor John Dugard commented, “The death of yet another detainee in suspicious circumstances again raises the whole question of the methods of interrogation employed by the security police.”
Given the level of public concern, it could be expected that the police would at least attempt to investigate Timol’s death with a degree of thoroughness. The task was given to the head of the CID, Major General Stoffel Buys. The good general did not disappoint his political masters. Before his investigation was complete, Buys told Rapport that Timol had jumped. The atmosphere in room 1026, the general declared, was the “most relaxed atmosphere imaginable in such circumstances”. He explained: “Ahmed Timol was sitting calmly in a chair. There were security men with him. At one stage two of them left the room. Mr Timol suddenly jumped up, aimed at the door. A security man jumped up to intercept him, but the Indian then stormed to the window and jumped through it. He was not scared or injured by anybody at any stage.”
The Sunday Times noted this peculiar statement by the general, wryly observing, “One wonders why General Stoffel Buys, head of the CID, bothers to continue with the official inquiry he is conducting into the death of the political detainee Ahmed Timol, considering that he has already given his finding in advance to a Nationalist Sunday newspaper.” When approached for comment by the Rand Daily Mail, Buys was less than friendly. “Why don’t you approach me first instead of going off at a tangent and blackening everybody? You have done your damnedest and already thrown dirt,” he told a reporter.
The magistrate found that the investigation had been impartial, as Buys was not after all a member of the security police. But the vast majority of the people of South Africa, and many throughout the world, found it difficult to believe that Timol had died for the reasons given by the security police. Doubts were even expressed by supporters of the apartheid government.
In accordance with standard procedure, an inquest was held. The Timol family were represented by Issie Maisels and myself; appearing for the police was Fanie Cilliers, who later became an eminent senior counsel; the evidence was led by PAJ Kotze, the senior public prosecutor. He regularly appeared in political trials in the Eastern Cape and the Transvaal, and was later the chosen magistrate to preside over the Neil Aggett inquest.
The magistrate, De Villiers, was an official who had done the ordinary run-of- the-mill criminal cases in the district and regional courts. Together with most of his colleagues, he did not enjoy a reputation of tending to disbelieve police officers.
Fanie Cilliers came to Maisels and me to say that he considered it his duty to bring our attention to the fact that the police had handed him a document, with instructions to use it, but he had refused to do so. The document appeared on the face of it to have been issued by the Communist Party of South Africa. Written in disjointed Marxist jargon, the document advised detained members of the communist party to complain of ill-treatment and assaults that did not happen, and to commit suicide rather than betray their comrades. The last paragraph was even more self-serving for the police propagandists.
It had obviously been drawn up for the purpose of the inquest to explain Essop’s supposed malingering and Timol’s suicide. It read: “Rather commit suicide than betray the organization … Vorster and his murderers will not halt our people when we have comrades like Archbishop Hurley, Rowley Arenstein, Vernon Berrange, Isie Maisels, MD Naidoo, George Bizos and others who have been fighting with us since the days of Rivonia.”
Fanie Cilliers did not say that he believed it was a forgery – he could hardly have said so because only his clients really had an interest in forging such a document – but indicated that he considered this last paragraph defamatory, and since his colleagues were involved he felt that he should not make it public. We thanked him for his consideration. The name of a leading Catholic bishop coupled with a group of lawyers known for their participation in the defence of political activists must have been incongruous even to the forgers.
At the inquest the police told their tale. It was Lieutenant Colonel van Wyk who read the documents seized in the car, and concluded that Timol was in contact with the central committee of the communist party then exiled in England and was in command of the “main unit” in South Africa. He was thus of “inestimable value” to the police.
“What this man was guilty of,” Van Wyk explained at the inquest, unmoved by the legal principle that a person was innocent until proven guilty, “was being head of a main unit of the communist party. He roneoed certain pamphlets and was found in possession of other unlawful documents. He knew how to make pamphlet bombs. In other words, this saboteur had been party to the letting off of bombs which released pamphlets and at the same time activated tapes. He was also in contact with the communist party in Britain.” Asked what else, Van Wyk added for good measure, “I can say that as a self-confessed communist he was involved in a plot to bring about revolution and mass murder in South Africa.” Van Wyk had his man.
Given the importance of their catch, the police decided to keep Timol in the security police offices at John Vorster Square. In the past, they explained, communists had escaped from prison or cells, including some whom Van Wyk himself had arrested, such as Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich, the absent main co- conspirators in the Rivonia Trial in which Nelson Mandela and others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Timol was extensively interrogated by a number of police officers, often for over 12 hours each day. Although Van Wyk was in charge of the interrogation, he was assisted by captains Richard Bean, JH Gloy and JZ van Niekerk.
On the night before his death, Timol was guarded by security police sergeants Bouwer and Louw, who testified that he slept well; it was warm and he slept in his underwear. At one point they even gave him some of their coffee while the two of them played cards. They both kept watch while their charge slept, or so they claimed. Sleep deprivation was common in the security police’s interrogation repertoire, and was usually overseen by policemen who were not integral to the questioning process.
I thus put it to Bouwer, “If the intention is that a person should sleep, it seems strange to me that two people should have to guard him … The office was not a very comfortable place for three persons to spend a night?”
“It is 10 by 18 paces,” he replied.
“It would not even pass municipal regulations. Why was it necessary for two sergeants to spend the night in the room?”
“It is usual for two guards to guard a prisoner. I think this is a regulation.”
“It is a pity it was not kept when Mr Timol jumped from the window.”
Whether or not Timol had slept, his interrogators found him co-operative the following morning, supplying them with names and addresses. The interrogation session that day, October 27, was the most productive, judging by the notes kept by the police.
“If you compare your notes written on the 27th,” Maisels put it to Gloy, “with those of the two previous days, it is incomparably more than the notes written on the two previous days, put together. On this, the last day of his life, he seems to have answered a large number of questions, which you recorded. He seems to have been more co-operative on the Wednesday than ever before.”
“Judged from the documents it does look that way, but is not really the case. On the two previous days we did not take comprehensive notes. He made hundreds of denials.”
Gloy’s answer confirmed Maisels’s question. If Timol was more co-operative, as seemed the case, what had happened that day, or the previous night? “Even if a man is unco-operative initially, he might talk more once we have got his confidence,” Gloy tried to explain. “This was our aim with Timol.”
The police had been trying to establish who the three men referred to in Timol’s documents as “Quentin, Martin and Henry” really were. Gloy and Van Niekerk were interrogating Timol on just this point that fateful afternoon. Gloy was happy to declare that it had been an From PAGE 25
“intensive interrogation” with regard to Quentin, Henry and Martin. But the interrogator could not remember how long it had endured. Between 10 minutes and an hour, he proffered. Maisels pointed out that from Gloy’s statement it appeared that most of the day was spent on this line of questioning
“The statement does give that impression,” Gloy responded, “but it did not happen like that.”
The interrogation was interrupted by Sergeant Joao Rodrigues. A clerk at security police headquarters in Pretoria, Rodrigues brought the officers some coffee and their pay cheques. Minutes later there was another visitor to office 1026. Known only as “Mr X”, he declared to Timol that the police knew the identity of Quentin, Martin and Henry. Timol, the police agreed, was shocked when he heard this. It was, Gloy explained, the “first and only time” the detainee had expressed this emotion. His eyes were “wild and staring”. Or, in the equally expressive words of Rodrigues, “The Indian appeared shocked when he heard the name … He moved his head from side to side and looked bewildered and shocked.”
The interrogators hurried to verify the information they had just received, leaving Rodrigues to guard the dangerous communist. Rodrigues explained what happened next: “The Indian asked me if he could go to the toilet. He was sitting on the chair opposite me. We both stood up and I moved to my left around the table. There was a chair in my way. When I looked up I saw the Indian rushing round the table in the direction of the window. I tried to get round the table, but his chair was in the way. Then I tried to get round the other way and another chair was in the way. The Indian already had the window open and was diving through it. When I tried to grab him I fell over the chair. I could not get at him.”
The 30-year-old school teacher lay dead on the southern side of John Vorster Square, 10 floors below the room where he had been interrogated for the past four days.
In a matter of seconds Timol had managed to dash across the tiny room, open the window (which was closed because of traffic noise), and hoist himself up and out. It was an incredible story. Rodrigues was vague on details. “How it happened I cannot say precisely, it all happened very quickly,” he explained.
Maisels asked him how Timol had opened the window. “He opened the catch with his hand,” Rodrigues replied.
“Then what did he do?”
“He opened it, and in one movement he dived through, head and arms first.”
Reconsidering, Rodrigues said Timol had fallen more than dived.
“He must have almost wriggled through the window,” Maisels suggested, referring to Timol’s height (1,6m) relative to the window (almost 1m).Magistrate de Villiers interrupted, “I cannot agree. I stood at the window myself.”
“I will argue that point later,” Maisels rejoined.
“I will not allow unfair questions to be put to the witness.”
“I will ask the witness to say what he saw. What did you see?”
“He opened the window and pushed it and then he fell through,” Rodrigues answered.
A strange enough story, made even stranger by the fact that it differed from the one given by General Buys. Buys had claimed that Timol initially made for the door, before jumping through the window. Gloy had also testified that Rodrigues told him that Timol had made as if he was aiming for the door.
“Did Mr Timol ever aim at the door?” Maisels asked Rodrigues.
“No, not that I saw.”
There must have been a misunderstanding, Rodrigues explained.
Rodrigues, it seemed, had given a number of different versions. Brigadier CW St John Pattle had conducted his own investigation in the wake of the incident. Rodrigues had given him a different version of events, in which he ran round the table in the opposite direction.
Rodrigues gave his version to the court, as did Van Niekerk and Gloy, Pattle and Buys. They all cited Rodrigues as their source, despite the anomalies. Which of the various versions, if any, was the truth? Buys had taken a statement from Rodrigues two weeks after the incident. “It seems strange to me,” Maisels observed, “that the most important person, as far as we can see, should be asked two weeks later to make a statement.”
Although Van Niekerk and Gloy claimed to have made notes at the time, they had destroyed these after making their affidavits.
I put it to Van Niekerk: “Not even children in standard four would write notes out and then throw them into the wastepaper basket. Why, having wasted your time making notes, did you throw them into the wastepaper basket?”
“I did not think them necessary.”
“I am going to put it to you that between these statements there was a substantial change of front as to how Timol met his death.”
The policeman did not have to answer, as Fanie Cilliers interjected, “I object – this is a fishing expedition.” This was a familiar expression whenever we probed into the happenings in the interrogation rooms of the security police.
Buys downplayed the significance of the different versions, ascribing it all to “a matter of interpretation”. His cross- examination was cut short when he collapsed in the witness box and had to leave the court. He was never recalled, allegedly on his doctor’s instructions.
If we accepted that Timol had jumped, in whichever precise sequence of events, the trigger was Mr X’s revelation. Why were the mysterious trio of Quentin, Martin and Henry so important? Colonel Van Wyk had explained that their full names were Quentin and Henry Jacobsen, twin brothers, and Martin Cohen. He told the court that Quentin Jacobsen and Timol were connected and planned acts of sabotage.
Quentin Jacobsen had been arrested on November 4. In his subsequent trial, he was acquitted. When Maisels explained that Timol’s name had not been mentioned in Jacobsen’s case, Van Wyk replied he was not involved in that case. He gave the same answer when Maisels pointed out that it had not been alleged that Cohen was an accomplice. All Van Wyk could say was that Jacobsen had been lucky to get off.
Captain van Niekerk also claimed that he thought Timol and Jacobsen were conspirators.
“You were wrong,” I told him. “Mr Jacobsen was acquitted.” It was known that I had defended him and was familiar with the facts and circumstances.
When the magistrate, fearing that I might go off on a tangent, objected to the relevance of this line, I explained, “Subsequent events have shown that Mr Timol could not possibly have been shocked by the news that Mr Jacobsen was arrested. This is a “terribly” relevant factor. It has been put before you that a man sitting comfortably on a chair was so shocked by this news that he jumped through the window. We are entitled to examine this theory.”
Major JFC Fick, who worked with Buys in the internal investigation, conceded that the police had tried to show a link between Jacobsen and Timol, but had failed. The proffered reason for Timol’s plunge had evaporated.
Often the body of a dead detainee on the mortuary slab was more compelling evidence on his behalf than the oral testimony he might have given had he survived the ordeal. His release would inevitably have taken place after his injuries had healed; he would have no witnesses to corroborate his story; and a team of security policemen would claim how well they had treated the detainee, even to the point that they had spent their own money to buy him meat pies and cold drinks.
With the assistance of Dr Jonathan Gluckman, the injuries – carefully noted and subjected to scientific examination – often told a story which could not be controverted, nor easily explained by witnesses whose loyalty to truth and justice was outweighed by their loyalty to the apartheid state, and to their fellow wrongdoers. Such was the case of Ahmed Timol.
After he had fallen 10 floors, the fresh injuries on his body could not have been easily attributed to an assault received before he crashed on to the ground. Gluckman had noticed numerous injuries which were not fresh; he explained to us that histologists could date the injuries by the length of the macrophage cells. The healing process comes about as healthy cells make themselves longer in order to devour or replace the injured cells. By measuring the length of the macrophagic cells, you could determine whether the injury was inflicted more than two, four, six, eight, 10 or 12 days before.
The scientific evidence showed that the injuries on Timol’s body were probably inflicted whilst he was in custody.
Three pathologists testified: the state pathologist Dr Scheepers, Dr Gluckman for the family, and Dr Koch for the police. The main difference of opinion related to the timing of pre-death injuries, which Scheepers and Gluckman dated to the time when Timol was in custody, and Kock dated some days earlier.
In concluding, Maisels said he did not want the court to declare whether Timol had been pushed or thrown: “All I am asking is for the court to find that it is not known how it came about that he left the window.” Indeed, Maisels continued, the police had left many aspects unexplained. One of these was the discrepancy in statements made by Rodrigues on the day of Timol’s death and his evidence in court. “In my day,” Maisels argued, “one took a statement from a witness as soon as one could. It is quite inexplicable that no written statement was taken from the man on the spot, Rodrigues, before November 11 – a fortnight after the occurrence.”
Maisels also pointed out that the police had not explained how Timol had sustained his pre-death injuries, which threw doubt on the “whole cotton-wool case”. Timol had had no injuries prior to his arrest, yet was found to have sustained injuries prior to his death. They could only have occurred during his detention. There was no doubt that Essop sustained such injuries; he was hospitalised because of them.
Ultimately, of course, it was the magistrate who was to decide. In a finding that highlighted his basic assumptions, Magistrate de Villiers stated that it was necessary to determine, in the first instance, if the deceased was murdered; if that was not the case, then he fell out of the window by accident; and if that was not the case, then he jumped out himself and committed suicide. To think of murder, he concluded, was absurd, as Timol was a valuable find to the security police, who desperately wanted to keep him. The possibility that the deceased fell by accident was also absurd, as it was to accept anything other than that he jumped out the window himself.
Assuming that Timol committed suicide, the magistrate continued, he had to determine, if possible on the available evidence, what the deceased’s motive had been: was it as a result of his torture or mistreatment by the police, or was it self-reproach, or did he dread a lengthy prison sentence or, lastly, was there a political motive, namely that he did it as a result of the communist ideology?
The magistrate rejected Maisels’s suggestions that the internal investigation was a “whitewashing”, saying that it was conducted by members of the South African Police, who were not members of the security police. It was difficult for De Villiers to doubt the bona fides of the South African Police.
The magistrate accepted that lesions found on Timol’s body may have been caused between one and seven days prior to his death, and the grazes between four and eight days prior to death. If the injuries occurred within four days, then it would have been while in police custody, but all the policemen testified against this, and the court had no reason to doubt their testimony. The medical experts could only speculate that the injuries were inflicted during a “brawl” when the deceased was pushed around. This, too, was unthinkable. He was a valuable find. He had given valuable information and more was expected.
Although the deceased was interrogated for long hours, he was handled in a “civilised and humane way”. Therefore, the magistrate concluded, one could not find the reason for suicide in torture or mistreatment. Evidence showed that Timol was a communist and was prominent in the communist party as leader of the “main unit” in South Africa. It must therefore be accepted that he was conversant with all orders to members, including the one which said, “Rather commit suicide than betray the organisation.” Thus the magistrate found that Timol killed himself for a combination of reasons: long jail sentence, giving names and addresses to the police, and the last straw, the revelation of Quentin, Martin and Henry’s identity, combined together with the communist ideology.
The magistrate concluded that no one was to blame, although he recommended that the district surgeon visit all detainees, especially to look for evidence of assault, which might prevent long inquests and unnecessary embarrassment to the police.
The inquest cleared the police, but there were still questions about what had really happened in room 1026. The anomalies in the police story, which we had so carefully exposed, were brushed aside by the confident strokes of a magistrate whose finding was based on two hallowed “facts”: the police were not likely to assault or kill a valuable detainee, and the detainee was likely to kill himself as a result of his “communist ideology”.
In the absence of justice, rumour and speculation take root. Was Timol accidentally dropped by the police during an interrogation session, as was later claimed by former BOSS agent Gordon Winter? Not known for his reliability, Winter argued that the police were trying to frighten the detainee, when their grip slipped. Much later, a detainee decribed how he had been held by the ankles by two security policemen and suspended head- down outside a window to look at the ground a number of floors below. The policemen took turns in letting go of one ankle at a time. The victim must have expected that sooner or later they would let both go. He might have struggled. Could Winter have been near the truth?
There was also the story that Timol’s body had been mutilated – a gouged eye, the testicles crushed, fingernails torn out. These allegations were publicised in England by a maverick Methodist minister, the Reverend Donald Morton. Twenty-five years later they resurfaced when Mrs Hawa Timol told the TRC that her son’s body had been mutilated. It was also said that the Muslim undertaker who had prepared Timol’s body for burial corroborated this story.
When Jonathan Gluckman heard of Morton’s allegations, he was outraged. He tried to set the record straight – Timol’s body had not been mutilated in the manner described. An affidavit taken by the police from the undertaker at the time confirmed this. Gluckman would not have missed something like this and his integrity was beyond question. Out of a mother’s grief came the sorrow that could not be soothed by apartheid justice.
For the security policemen and state prosecutors, the Timol inquest was another victory to which they gave expression in their own crass manner. “The only thing Lowen and Maisels proved in the Salojee and Timol inquests,” ran a “joke” popular in their quarters, “was that Indians couldn’t fly.” This was repeated in the Bar common room by members close to the police. Some of the members laughed, although few would admit it today.
No one to Blame? In Pursuit of Justice in South Africa by George Bizos, published by David Philip and Mayibuye Books, will be available next week.