Timol: ‘We saw no evil, heard no evil’
SEE no evil, hear no evil. This was the theme of yesterday’s leg of the Ahmed Timol inquest.
Both the former security policeman at John Vorster Square and an administrative clerk who took the stand in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, either “did not know or could not recall” what happened.
Neville Els, 82, joined the SAPS as an ordinary policeman and security police in the early 1960s, leaving towards the end of the 1970s.
He was adamant that during his career and while working on the 9th floor of John Vorster Square, he had not witnessed a single detainee being assaulted or tortured.
“What I know is what I read in the newspapers,” he said.
As his cross-examination proceeded, Jan Rodrigues said he had heard his colleagues talk about the methods applied during interrogations, but he was adamant that it did not amount to torturing.
Rodrigues, now 78, and the last man said to have seen Timol alive, also denied that he knew anything about torturing of detainees. “I only know what I read in the newspapers,” he said.
Rodrigues said that when he walked into the interrogation room on October 27, 1971, to hand Timol’s two interrogators their pay cheques, everything was calm.
He claimed that Timol was enjoying a cup of coffee with his interrogators – in spite of medical evidence that Timol’s jaw was shattered to pieces at the time.
While medical evidence indicated that Timol also had a fractured skull and a fractured ankle, which would have made it impossible for him to walk, Rodrigues stuck to his guns that he had “dived” out of the window.
Rodrigues said he worked for the police in an office in Pretoria at the time and went to John Vorster Square that day to take salary slips and cheques to Timol’s interrogators – captains Hans Gloy and Faan van Niekerk. He claimed the officers and Timol drank their coffee, when an unknown officer walked in.
“The man said Timol’s three accomplices had been arrested. He then left. I saw Timol was extremely shocked.”
Rodrigues said the two officers asked him to guard Timol, although he was unarmed. Timol simply stared ahead of him. A few minutes later, Timol asked whether he could go to the toilet.
Rodrigues said he noticed that Timol was opening the window. “The next moment, I saw him diving out of the window it all happened in a split second,” he said.
He said he and a host of other officers ran down to the ground floor, where Gloy and Van Niekerk felt his pulse. “There was still a faint heartbeat.”
Rodrigues claimed he was asked to lie by a General Buys in his statement to the inquest court that there was a struggle between him and Timol.