When cops stoop to criminal tactics
THE road to Msinga Top takes you through stony valleys and past scattered settlements rising high into mountains where goats nibble on sparse scrub.
Retired teacher Ntombana Malinga has lived in this remote corner of KwaZulu-Natal all her life. At 98, she thought she’d seen it all. But on June 3, her world imploded.
Just after midnight, three constables in uniform burst into her grandson Philani Malinga’s room. They cuffed his hands behind him, shackled his legs and dragged him to a rondavel. They never told her why.
When she tried to follow, they threw her to the ground. After they left, she went to investigate. “All of a sudden I heard Philani’s voice: ‘Gogo, I’m dying. Gogo, I’m dying.’ ”
His brother loaded him into his car to drive him to hospital. They did not get far. “He died just here,” says Ntombana, pointing to a driveway. “What did he do to deserve such a cruel death? If maybe it’s legal for the police to kill people, then I’ve got nothing to say.”
A postmortem found Philani died from “suffocation and assault”, says the Independent Police Investigative Directorate. He was probably tortured to death. The constables were charged with murder but are out on bail.
Philani Malinga’s death is not an isolated incident. According to the latest official statistics, in the past year police killed 423 people, with 244 others dying in custody, assaulted 3 711 people and tortured 145.
The hardest-hit provinces are Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. Civil claims against the police for misconduct totalled R9.5-billion in the past year.
Almost all categories of police brutality are increasing. Torture is up by 86%. But human rights lawyers and researchers interviewed say this is the tip of the iceberg because most victims are too afraid to report the crime and torture is often classified as assault.
“Go to any street corner in a township in Johannesburg and ask the young men if anyone has been tortured,” says Professor Malose Langa, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand specialising in police brutality. “That’s exactly what I did. I was shocked. Almost everyone either knew someone who’d been tortured or had been tortured themselves.”
He documented his findings in a recently released report for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
His findings were supported by torture victims interviewed by the Sunday Times.
In May, Jackson Maponya*, 25, was tortured by being smothered repeatedly with a latex glove pulled over his head while being doused with water.
Torture is routinely used at his local police station, he says. “That day I was tortured I saw another one who was tortured. If they have that special room where they will take you . . . This is a common thing and many people are not aware.”
He is suing the police but many torture victims are too scared to do so. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are too afraid of retaliation from their torturers,” he says. “So they get away with murder.”
Sipho Siyanda* was 12 in 2011 when police picked him up at school and took him to the toilets at the local police station. They ordered him to strip to his underwear, threw a black rubbish bag over his head and repeatedly tightened a belt around his neck while beating him. His family has won a civil claim against the police.
Andile Ncube* was arrested in Sharpeville in 2010. During his interrogation, which lasted four and a half hours, his hands were cuffed behind his back and he was smothered with a plastic bag and rubber tube while being beaten savagely. He won a claim against the police this year.
This is just small sampling of what is happening every day in police stations throughout South Africa, especially to poor, young black men in townships.
“I’ve been dealing with torture cases involving police in Soweto for at least 20 years,” says human rights lawyer Peter Jordi. “The same techniques, fundamentally, are being repeated.” He describes obtaining secret civil warrants entitling him to search police stations with a sheriff of the court.
“I have found pickaxe handles. I’ve found these electric shock machines in the . . . top drawer of someone’s desk.”
The “sausage roll method” is common. “They wrap you in a blanket so your head is out one side, your feet out the other. You are rendered immobile.”
Suspects are then smothered. “It could be a dustbin bag, a plastic shopping packet, it could
SHATTERED: Ntombana Malinga’s grandson Philani Malinga died shortly after police interrogated him be a condom, maybe it’s a latex glove. It’s the same as waterboarding, where you’re drowning, you can’t breathe.”
Sometimes suspects are also given electric shocks. “There’s the ‘roast chicken method’ where you are like a roast chicken on a spit,” Jordi says. A suspect’s hands are cuffed around his knees. A pickaxe handle is placed under the knees and the suspect is suspended between two tables “while they give you electric shocks” .
Torture is illegal but Jordi believes it is sanctioned to get information. “I have no doubt that everybody in the police station, all the police officers, know what is happening and probably approve what is happening.”
One of the most shocking cases we have investigated was a string of suspect killings allegedly committed by the Cato Manor organised crime unit in Durban, under the ultimate command of provincial Hawks head MajorGeneral Johan Booysen.
Our investigation has established that four squad members close to Booysen — Willie Olivier, Anton Lockem, Eugene van Tonder and Paul Mostert — are linked to dozens of suspicious killings stretching back more than a decade. All have been indicted for murder.
In just four years, between 2007 and 2011, the four men were involved in 18 suspect shootings that led to 28 deaths.
In six weeks in 2008, the Cato Manor squad killed five leaders of a taxi association and one of their bodyguards in four suspect shootings. Within a year they had killed its chairman, Bongani Mkhize, and two prominent association members in three more suspect shootings.
Mkhize’s family has since won a civil suit against the police.
Sources inside or close to the unit, as well as victims, told us it routinely tortured suspects. Video footage showing members torturing a hijacking suspect at their offices in 2004 supports this view.
Twenty-seven detectives from the Cato Manor squad, among them the four men closest to Booysen, are expected to go on trial next year facing 116 charges, including 28 counts of murder.
Last year, in court, Booysen got all charges against him dropped. He was also cleared in a disciplinary hearing. But in September, he was suspended for related offences.
Police Minister Nathi Nhleko denies that the high and increasing number of assaults, alleged murders, rapes and torture cases shows he has lost control, but concedes police brutality is “a serious problem”. He has set up a panel of experts in line with recommendations of the Marikana inquiry.
A key intervention will be training to change the mindset of police who believe torturing and even executing suspects is a short cut to cracking cases.
“Under apartheid, you had a police service that was constitutionally mandated and sanctioned to be brutal,” Nhleko says. “The bulk of the police members we have were schooled and cultured in a particular way before 1994.”
Nhleko’s words are scant comfort to Philani Malinga, Bongani Mkhize, Jackson Maponya, Sipho Siyanda, Andile Ncube and thousands like them.
“I will never trust the police again,” says Philani’s grandmother, Ntombana. “When I see a police officer I see a criminal.”
Booysen, Van Tonder, Mostert, Olivier and Lockem declined to be interviewed. * Not their real names
They have that special room where they will take you . . . All the officers know what’s happening and probably approve
This investigation will be screened as a documentary called ‘Echoes of Apartheid’ on Al Jazeera on Wednesday
Next week: More skeletons in the Cato Manor ‘death squad’ case