South
African police accused of routinely torturing crime suspects
Arrested men say how they experienced police brutality from beatings to
suffocation used to extract confessions
Sunday 14 April 2013 15.38 BSTLast modified on Thursday 6 November 2014
21.30 GMT
The Bloemfontein tourist centre is a neat, red building overlooking the
bus terminal and the football stadium. For visitors to the city it's a fountain
of information and advice, but taxi driver William Dube says that for him the
innocuous-looking building will always be associated with his torture at the
hands of the police.
Dube, a 33-year-old from Pretoria, is awaiting trial in Bloemfontein's
Grootvlei prison after being arrested in 2010 on armed robbery charges, by
officers of South Africa's organised crime unit. Two weeks later, he says he was taken to an unmarked
suite of offices in the tourist centre, where the officers cuffed him to a
chair.
"They
attached wires to my penis and back from
something that looked like an old phone," he said. "Then they wound it
up to get power to shock me. It was
very, very painful. I even wet myself."
Dube
said the officers covered his head with a plastic bag and sealed it with duct
tape. "They only remove the plastic when you collapse, then they take
it off. While they
were suffocating me, they put
pepper spray inside the plastic bag and sealed it. They kicked and punched me
in the eye and ear. I still can't hear properly."
He says he was taken to the balcony and hung upside down over the edge, an officer
holding each leg. That is when he agreed to co-operate with the investigation.
"I was terrified they'd drop me," Dube said. "They told me places to
point out, how to make a confession and what to say. I did the
pointing out the next day."
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