South Africa:
Four apartheid- era police officers to be charged in the 1983 slaying of a young activist.
JOHANNESBURG — The body of a young antiapartheid activist who was kidnapped and tortured in 1983 by South African police has never been found, her family never able to mourn at a grave, her killers not sent to prison.
Now, more than three decades later, prosecutors plan to charge four police officers for the murder of Nokuthula Simelane after Simelane’s family went to court to force the National Prosecuting Authority to press charges.
The new move against the former policemen goes to the heart of long- running tension in South Africa over the push for reconciliation among the country’s racial groups and the desire to punish perpetrators of human rights abuses during the traumatic decades that preceded multiracial elections in 1994. But the case is murky, with some of the officers involved having admitted to kidnapping and torturing the young woman, but claiming they released her after she agreed to be an informant.
The 23- year- old, freshly graduated from university, had been a courier for the armed wing of the then- banned African National Congress when she was snatched by the police and tortured for weeks, according to the officers’ own testimony 16 years ago to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But the policemen insisted that they had succeeded in “turning” Simelane through the torture, convincing her to work for them. The police said officers had driven her to Swaziland, where she had been living and attending college before she was kidnapped, to be their informant against the ANC.
She was never seen in Swaziland by relatives or friends after she was purportedly dropped off at the border. The police indicated that antiapartheid fighters might have eliminated Simelane themselves.
Luvuyo Mfaku, a prosecution spokesman, said the decision to prosecute was based on the “strength of the evidence and the merits of the case.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which could grant amnesty to those who fully confessed to human rights abuses committed during apartheid, recommended that more than 300 cases be prosecuted, but the Simelane murder is “one of the only” cases pursued by prosecutors, according to a statement from an attorney for Simelane’s family and a lawyer for the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, which is involved in the case.
The suspects are Willem Coetzee, Anton Pretorius, Frederick Mong and Msebenzi Radebe, the statement said.
The four suspects are due in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court on Feb. 26.