Apartheid policeman takes Ahmed Timol secrets to his grave
FORMER apartheid policeman João Rodrigues has died without disclosing his secrets about exactly how anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol died nearly 50 years ago.
Rodrigues, who was in his eighties, died on Monday evening at his Wonderboom South home in Pretoria.
His estranged son-in-law, Driekus Stander, said they were still waiting for the death certificate to see exactly how he had died.
Rodrigues, in an application for a stay of his prosecution for the murder of Timol, had said he suffered from ill health. It was said in court papers he had a stroke in April.
Stander said his wife Tilana, Rodrigues’s daughter, heard from another family member her father had died.
She had not spoken to her father for decades after he raped her as a child.
She had recently instituted criminal charges against him. The elderly Rodrigues admitted in a letter to the court that he raped and sexually abused her for years.
In terms of mediation procedures, his daughter agreed for the charges to be dropped against her father, in light of him admitting to what he had done.
Her husband yesterday said she has received closure on the subject.
“It’s good that she went that route, because if the trial proceeded, he would have died before the end.”
Stander said he had mixed feelings about the fact that his father-in-law was dead, but the most important thing to him was that his wife had received closure before his death.
“Wherever he is going, he will have to answer for what he has done,” Stander said.
Timol’s nephew, Imtiaz Cajee, said he was filled with mixed emotions as it would now never be known how his uncle Timol had died.
“He is going to his grave with his secrets about what happened that day in room 1026 at John Vorster Square.”
Rodrigues admitted he was the last person to see Timol alive after he was interrogated by apartheid era secret police. He, however, maintained Timol was healthy and fine when he saw him and that Timol suddenly ran to the window and jumped.
Cajee said the government should be held responsible for the fact that Timol’s family would never know the truth.
The family pleaded with government for years to pursue the apartheid era killings. It is nearly four years since Judge Billy Mothle’s judgment that Rodrigues, among others, should be prosecuted.
He appeared more than 19 times in the Johannesburg High Court, yet the trial had not started. Rodrigues lost his bid for a stay of prosecution and took his plight to the Constitutional Court.
He died before that court could rule on the matter.