Timol verdict likely to leave many questions unanswered

Judgment in the reopened inquest into the death of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol in police custody 46 years ago, due to be given on Thursday, is likely to leave many questions unanswered.

A 1972 inquest found that the young teacher – a member of the South African Communist Party, who had trained in Moscow with former President Thabo Mbeki – had committed suicide after jumping out of a 10th storey window at John Vorster Square in Johannesburg.

Timol died four days after being arrested in a roadblock. He was suspected of being behind a successful campaign to spread SACP and ANC pamphlets all over South Africa.

The police had alleged during the first inquest that members of the SACP had instructions to commit suicide rather than to reveal information.

Apartheid-era SACP members deny this. Medical evidence presented in the reopened inquest strongly suggest that Timol had been tortured before his fall and would not have been able to jump out of the window by himself.

But Joao (Jan) Rodrigues, the former security pay clerk who was the last man to see Timol alive, stuck to his version that Timol dived out of the window.

He insisted Timol was left alone with him after the two interrogators, Captain Johannes van Niekerk and Captain Johannes Gloy (both now dead), had stepped out of the room for a moment.

The new inquest revealed that the police had, instead of calling an ambulance to help the critically injured Timol, carried him back into the building on a blanket.

A baffling aspect which came out during the new inquest was the time of Timol’s death.

Some civilians who saw or heard him fall insisted it was in the morning, while Rodrigues and other former policemen said it happened in the afternoon.