NPA to reopen Timol probe
The family have always wanted the racist inquest finding reversed. That may now happen, and other South African families deserve to be afforded the same peace, writes Janet Smith
JOHANNESBURG: Forty-four years since an inquest found that no one was to blame for Ahmed Timol’s death, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has agreed to reopen the case.
Forty-five years ago today, Timol, who was a teacher and member of the SACP and an anti-apartheid activist, allegedly died at the hands of security police at the John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.
Days of alleged torture and threats culminated in an incident where Timol was seemingly thrown from the 10th-floor window of the building. The inquest that followed has been described as a farce by Timol’s family, with the presiding magistrate ruling the 30-year-old’s death a suicide.
Despite medical evidence presented of gruesome torture, the magistrate found the security police had treated Timol compassionately, and no one was responsible for his death.
After a private investigation launched by the Timol family and human rights activists, the evidence uncovered was presented to the NPA. National Director of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams on Tuesday called for a new inquest into Timol’s death.
Confirming Abrahams’s decision, Dr JP Pretorius, of the Priority Crimes Litigation Unit, told the Timol family: “We are of the opinion that there is compelling evidence that necessitates the reopening of the inquest in the interest of justice.”
Responding to the NPA’s decision, Timol’s nephew, Imtiaz Ahmed Cajee, said he hoped the family of Neil Aggett would get similarly good news soon. “My grandmother has since passed away, but she will be smiling in heaven today,” Cajee said.
He added that the family sought the reopening of the inquest to have the finding of “nobody to blame” reversed.
Aggett, a medical doctor and trade union organiser, also died while in detention after being arrested in 1982.
AN INQUEST was first opened into Ahmed Timol’s death on December 1, 1971 in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court by JJL de Villiers, an apartheid official, with DW Rothwell and ALT Beukes as public prosecutors. This would have been an usual, acceptable and formidable panel of the time – only the inquest was being driven off the outrage of 21 deaths in racist police custody, and the calibre of lawyer De Villiers, Rothwell and Beukes were to face were gentlemen for whom human rights were the only justice.
These were advocate Israel (Isie) Aaron Maisels, QC, and advocate George Bizos, with instructing attorneys MSH Cachalia and Mia Ahmed Loonat. Cachalia and Loonat represented the family of young teacher Ahmed Timol, whose lifeless form had lain 10 terrifying floors below room 1026 at John Vorster Square just 34 days before proceedings opened.
The legal team for Timol was extraordinary. When the great Sydney Kentridge, QC, delivered a personal tribute to Maisels in 1993, he referred to the sensational Daisy de Melker murder trial of the early 1930s when Maisels was junior counsel, and that of two young men, sons of well-known Joburg families, whose discharge Maisels secured after they were accused of killing Bubbles Schroeder.
But it was Maisels’s conduct of the defence in the Treason Trial, where he had led a large team of advocates against the prosecution, which affected Kentridge, who was on his team, the most. Still, such was the hatred with which Timol’s case was touched, that even though the defence had a team under the exemplary Maisels – who had earned wide respect – it was found that Timol had “committed suicide”, with the magistrate announcing his report on June 22, 1972.
De Villiers said no one could be blamed, and evidence of physical torture on Timol’s body, mere days from his 30th birthday, was ignored. The inquest request said instead that he had “multiple injuries”.
It is, therefore, an important moment in post-apartheid history that four decades of struggle by the Timol family and human rights activists have not been in vain, as the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) announced on Tuesday that it is finally going to reopen the inquest.
It seems astonishing that there was ever hesitance on a post-1994 government’s part, yet it had to be persuaded through a private investigation launched on behalf of the family, during which fresh evidence was given to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks). Now, that evidence is “compelling”, says the controversial Shaun Abrahams, and Minister of Justice Michael Masutha is to approach the judge president of the Gauteng High Court for the hearing.
It seems especially disappointing that this decision took too long for Timol’s late mother Hawa, whose desperate grief is forever on record as she appeared before the TRC in 1996 to plead for the inquest to be reopened. The family have always wanted the finding to be reversed.
A partial set of the inquest records was at last made available last year, donated by advocate Loonat to the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (AKF), which subsequently made the collection available to the public through the Wits Historical Papers Research Archive. These were digitised over a month, with the original records held at the AKF in Joburg.
Last year the foundation’s director, Neeshan Balton, thanked Loonat for donating the documents, saying the records provided “valuable insight into understanding the workings of the apartheid administration when dealing with deaths in detention”. Equally, Timol’s brother Mohammad, also an anti-apartheid activist, said “the significance of the documents is that one can study how the apartheid Special Branch forces and the legal system was so politicised”.
Such is the importance of the case that Wits law students study it within their curriculum, as Maisels challenged the police’s refusal to give the defence team documents at the time, and, after an appeal at the high court, a judgment was made in his favour. That was precedent-setting. Loonat explained last year that the defence also succeeded in seeing the police prevented from further torturing Salim Essop, the young activist arrested with Timol at a roadblock in Coronationville a few days before Timol died.
Ever in the vanguard of giving memory to Timol has been his nephew, Imtiaz Ahmed Cajee, who was so moved by the effect Timol’s detention had on his grandmother, Hawa, that he’s made it his life’s work to earn justice for his uncle. Cajee was a mere five years old when Timol was held. His book, A Quest for Justice, has been an unparalleled resource. He’s now working on the second edition.
The inquest documents make for horrified reading, such that the agony which apartheid brought upon a nation becomes all the closer, all the colder. For instance, one Gabriel Johannes Deysel, a police officer linked to the Special Branch, describes in his 1971 affidavit how he was walking down the corridor of the 10th floor when he heard someone “scream” that Timol had “jumped out of the window while he was being interrogated”.
He told how he immediately grabbed blankets and ran to the lift, where he came across a Lieutenant-Colonel Greyling. “Upon our arrival,” Deysel claimed, “Timol was lying on his stomach, his right arm under his body, his left arm a little away from his body with the pulse upwards. His right leg was bent inwards and his left leg straight out. His right foot was without a shoe.”
Deysel claimed he and Greyling felt for a pulse, and he, Deysel, believed it was still beating. Greyling then apparently ran to get a doctor. Deysel said there was no blood in evidence. But in a grotesque passage, he then describes how he pushed a blanket under Timol’s left side and tried to roll him onto it, but “the first time, it went wrong as (Timol’s) body slipped out of his hands”.
It was then, said Deysel, that he saw blood, and by the time he and his colleagues had brought Timol into the reception area of John Vorster, there was no longer a pulse. “I knew he was dead.”
Reopening of the Timol inquest must finally be the precedent we need, so other South African families will at last also be able to find their peace out of this horror.