Aggett was not suicidal, former cop testifies

FORMER apartheid special branch policeman Paul Erasmus has testified how he helped in the desperate search for information that gave the impression that anti-apartheid activist Dr Neil Aggett was suicidal, due to depression.

Erasmus was yesterday giving testimony at the reopened inquest into the death of Aggett, whose body was found in his cell at the notorious John Vorster Square police station in 1982, after being tortured.

Erasmus, who testified before the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was responsible for some of the tortures of political detainees at the station.

He revealed that the security police branch deliberately brought political detainees “to the brink of death” through third-degree torturing methods in order to “break” them and get them to speak.

The methods would include suffocation, strangling, waterboarding, application of electric shocks, and forced exercises, deprivation of sleep and beatings which sometimes included the crushing of a detainee’s private parts.

While Aggett’s death was declared a suicide by a previous inquest, his fellow detainees at the time blamed it on the security police who were torturing him.

Erasmus said attempts to obtain information that painted Aggett as a “walking suicide” while at the station, including visiting his former schools, were unsuccessful.

“We essentially got nothing from them apart from a large deal of hostility and disbelief about what we were setting out to achieve,” he said.

He testified that the search for information that linked Aggett to clinical depression was unsuccessful.

Erasmus also recalled how Aggett’s chief interrogator, Stephan Whitehead, showed him a “strangely written” statement which he claimed was written by Aggett before he died.

“It started off at paragraph one, and I am not sure if my memory is correct, before any of these formalities he put in a very strange sentence which said: ‘I am a Marxist and a communist and adhere to a communist philosophy’, something to that effect.”

He said Whitehead had also revealed to him that he might have pushed Aggett too far with the torture, including keeping him awake for over 60 hours.

He said security police were trained to apply torture in a way that made it difficult to detect when detainees complained and the police had “sweepers” who helped destroy evidence.