RODRIGUES BACK IN COURT

FORMER apartheid-era security policeman Joao “Jan” Rodrigues returns to court today to face charges relating to the 1971 murder of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol.

Rodrigues’s lawyers requested a postponement in order to prepare argument for a permanent stay of prosecution. They hinted that they would argue he was too elderly (he is apparently 79), and the murder was perpetrated too long ago for justice to be able to take its course.

An inquest into Timol’s death in October 1971 was held in 1972.

The presiding apartheid magistrate upheld Rodrigues’s version that Timol committed suicide by jumping through a 10th floor window during a break in his interrogation. But after the Timol family was able to place new evidence before a re-opened inquest last year, Justice Billy Mothle recommended that prosecutors re-consider Rodrigues’s role in Timol’s murder. The judge also recommended that prosecutors consider the roles of two other former security policemen who gave evidence at the re-opened inquest – Neville Els and Seth Sons – in the interrogation and torture of detainees.

Rodrigues is the first of the three to be brought to court.

Timol was the 22nd of at least 73 anti-apartheid activists to die in police detention between 1963 and 1990.

Last month, the National Prosecutions Authority signalled its intention to reopen a second inquest into the death in detention of Pietermaritzburg dentist Dr Hoosen Haffejee. The families of other detainees who died in detention continue to long for justice. | Staff Reporter