S.African apartheid-era cop facing decades-old murder charge, dies

A South African former apartheid-era officer, accused of killing a liberation activist half-a century ago, died Tuesday weeks before his appeal against prosecution was due to be heard, his lawyer said.

Joao Rodrigues, who was 82 at the time of his death, was an officer in the police’s feared security branch and was charged with murdering anti-white rule campaigner Ahmed Timol while he was in custody in 1971.

“He passed on early this morning,” lawyer Ben Minnaar, told AFP.

The Constitutional Court was due to hear on September 30, his appeal for a stay of prosecution.

Timol,29, was arrested in Johannesburg in October 1971 and died five days later when he plummeted from the 10th-floor of the city’s police headquarters.

Officers said at the time he took his own life — a verdict that was endorsed by an inquest in 1972 but finally overturned by a court in 2017 after a decades-long campaign by his family.

The campaign by Timol’s family to try get his alleged killers in the dock so long after the advent of democracy in 1994, was seen as a test case for families of other activist victims whose killers have not yet been brought to justice.

“He will not see his day in court and be exposed for his lies,” Timol’s nephew Imtiaz Cajee, told AFP.

“His version of events that my uncle was free of injuries and jumping to his death simply is not true,” he said.