Five Seek Amnesty In Apartheid Murder Former S. African Officers Step Forward In Death Of Steve Biko

After 20 years of judicial smoke screens and official denials, the beating death of Steve Biko at the hands of security police, which became an international cause celebre and helped dramatize the viciousness of the apartheid system, finally may be solved.

Phila Ngqumba, a spokesman for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the panel recently was approached by lawyers representing five former officers who want to apply for amnesty in the slaying of the anti-apartheid activist.

If the former officials, including one of Biko’s chief interrogators, Col. Harold Snyman, decide to tell all, their revelations will further discredit the most senior political and security leaders of the era, many of whom still hold important positions in the new black-led government.

Biko headed the Black Consciousness Movement and at the time was arguably South Africa’s best-known political dissident. His death in detention prompted worldwide outrage and was instrumental in the imposition of U.N. arms and oil sanctions against Pretoria’s white-minority regime.

This would be the first admission of wrongdoing in the case by security officers of the apartheid regime, although it still is not clear to what the men will confess. “They are preparing the applications,” Ngqumba said.

The commission, created to deal with South Africa’s violent past, has the power to grant immunity from prosecution to anyone who confesses committing politically motivated human rights abuses and other crimes before May 10, 1994, when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated after winning the country’s first all-race presidential elections.

Biko’s death on Sept. 12, 1977, made him a symbol and martyr of apartheid-era barbarity. A former medical student, he was a charismatic speaker and prolific author who infuriated white authorities by urging blacks to reject white supremacy and embrace self-reliance.

His fame far exceeded that of Mandela, who then was imprisoned and whose earlier leadership of the black resistance movement was overshadowed in the nationwide riots sparked by the 1976 Soweto student uprisings.

Donald Woods, a former newspaper editor whose friendship with Biko and whose subsequent escape from South Africa was dramatized in the popular film, “Cry Freedom,” said Monday that Biko “would have played a central role in the new South Africa.”

“He was a brilliant man,” Woods said. “He would have been right at the center of things.”

Woods said the five former security police preparing to seek amnesty were among those who interrogated and allegedly beat Biko, then 31, after he was arrested at a roadblock and detained at security branch headquarters in Port Elizabeth. Despite severe injuries, Biko was thrown naked on the metal floor of a Land Rover and driven nearly 700 miles to Pretoria, where he died in a police cell.

The five officers are Snyman, who led the interrogation team; retired Lt. Col. Gideon Nieuwoudt; Ruben Marx, then a security branch warrant officer; Johan Beneke, another warrant officer; and then-Capt. Daantjie Siebert.

Francois Jacobus van der Merwe, a Port Elizabeth lawyer representing several members of the group, said Monday that the amnesty applications are confidential and that he could not discuss their contents. “This is a very sad story,” he said in a telephone interview. “This involves so-called human rights abuses and there are families involved on both sides.”

After an international outcry, the white government reluctantly set up an inquest in the matter of Bantu Steven Biko. But the presiding judge concluded that while Biko may have been tortured, no one was directly responsible for his death.

That inquest, widely condemned as a sham, is a major reason behind increasingly loud calls that the Truth Commission, led by the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Desmond Tutu, should investigate not just the police and the army but lawyers and judges who covered up for the apartheid regime; the doctors who examined hundreds of tortured and murdered activists but forged medical reports indicating otherwise; and even journalists, some of whom actively spied for the regime.