Grim torturer of apartheid era dies at 54

Published on Saturday 20 August 2005 01:26

FORMER South African security policeman Gideon Nieuwoudt, who commanded the torture of anti-apartheid hero Steve Biko, has died at the age of 54 from cancer.

Nieuwoudt was notorious as one of the apartheid government's most sinister operatives and was connected with several infamous cases which exposed the white government's brutality toward its political opponents.

"He was feared by the people he interrogated, tortured and murdered," SABC radio said, reporting his death in a Port Elizabeth hospital. "He used torture machines, electric shocks, wet bags or poison to extract information from activists, and often disguised himself as a priest."

When apartheid yielded to multi-racial democracy in 1994, he was denied amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the 1977 fatal torture of Biko,

founder of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement, who suffered brain damage in interrogation and died after being driven 625 miles naked and bleeding in a police van.

Nieuwoudt was also involved in burning the bodies of three activists from Port Elizabeth in 1985 and a 1989 car bombing which killed three black policemen and an informer who had threatened to detail police atrocities.

Niewoudt served some time for crimes under apartheid but evaded a 20-year sentence from the car bombing after he was freed on appeal.