A South African family have begun a quest to unravel the cause of the mysterious death of a 23-year-old man, Matthew Mabelane, who had reportedly died in 1977, the era of Apartheid in South Africa.
Reports revealed that in February 1977, the father of the deceased, Philip Mabelane, 95, heard that a detainee died in an unusual way.
Speaking to AFP he said.
“I heard the news report that a detainee jumped from the 10th floor” of Johannesburg police headquarters
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The victim who was said to have jumped from the tenth floor was his son, Matthew, who was also is an anti-apartheid activist that had been arrested after he crossed the Botswana border two weeks earlier.
Phillip wondered with one single question that had haunted him. “How can someone jump from the 10th floor when you have done nothing bad?”
“Matthews loved life, he loved jazz, he loved music, he loved girls, he was a socialite. He could not have committed suicide,” said Lasch, 63, his brother. “Matthews was pushed.”
In short, none of the Mabelanes ever believed the Police version of the cause of his death, stating that he jumped.
A human rights activists said 73 people had died in Police detention in circumstances similar to that of Mathew’s case.
Ahmed Timol, an activist was also said to have jumped from a 10th-storey building of the same police station and died.
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After battling with the grievous case of Timol’s death, his family called the prosecutors for a reopening inquest into the case of his death.
The reopening of Timol’s case gave the Mabelanes hope to revisit theirs too, hoping that the cause of death of other South African victims of apartheid will also be uncovered.
Hearing Timol’s case, witnesses described in detail to a Pretoria court the extreme violence meted out against opponents of the regime. Torture at police headquarters included electric shocks, testicles crushed “like pepper” and jaws and skulls fractured by savage beatings.
Lasch listened attentively to the hearings from the public gallery, stunned by what he heard.
“There was a modus operandi” among the police, he said.
“The Timol inquest gave us hope… We never thought that it would happen, that the truth would come to the surface.”
With this reopening to the cause of Timol’s death, the Mabelane family have pressed on with efforts to secure a proper investigation of Matthews’ death too.
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One of the greatest success the family recorded on the cause of Mathew’s death was a lead from UN report of 1979 in which two-and-a-half pages dealt with Matthews’ death.
The document quotes the police inquiry into the death which claimed that Matthews “forced the window open” and climbed onto a ledge. – ‘Forced to climb out’ – “The police were unable to stop him but called to him to come back… he lost his balance and fell to his death,” the police investigation said.
However, the UN found that it will be absurd for one to suggest escaping through the window of a 10th-floor building. This, therefore, made the UN conclude that.
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“There is a strong, and in the circumstances irresistible, inference that he was forced to climb out of the window because he was being tortured,”
A report later gathered that when Mathew’s family members retrieved the corpse they discovered in his blood-soaked trouser lining a disturbing message which reads to Mathew’s brother, Lasch.
“Brother Lasch, tell mother and my other brothers that the police will push me from the 10th floor. I bid you farewell,”
Phillip Mabelane, father of the deceased activist prays that justice will be done while he is still alive.
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