OPINION: The testimony of former Security Branch policeman Nicholas Deetlefs this week at the Neil Aggett inquest might have finally given prosecutors enough evidence to prosecute and jail one of the most notorious interrogators at John Vorster Square.
The testimony of former Security Branch policeman Nicholas Deetlefs this week at the Neil Aggett inquest might have finally given prosecutors enough evidence to prosecute and jail one of the most notorious interrogators at John Vorster Square. Deetlefts started his career in 1979 on the 10th floor. He remained there as an “experienced” interrogator of political detainees until 1994.
This week, his many victims, in South Africa and abroad, finally got to see him questioned on the stand in the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg, while advocate Howard Varney, acting on behalf of the Aggett family, largely discredited Deetlef’s testimony which, at times, bordered on the absurd.
Deetlefs would have us believe that the 10th floor had such a “nice atmosphere” that “detainees preferred to sleep there rather than in their cells”. For the victims of the apartheid regime, the 10th floor of John Vorster Square was widely known to be a place of terror, where victims were subjected to electric shocks, sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings and far worse.
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