‘Tubing’ — the apartheid-era torture method still prevalent within the police

Police officers in South Africa still regularly use an apartheid-era suffocation torture method during interrogations. Despite the widespread use of torture within the police, implicated officers are rarely disciplined.

The South African government has also failed to respond to a confidential United Nations country visit report from 2023, which found that the country is failing in its international treaty obligations to prevent torture.

These are the findings of a New York Times investigation which was published last week.

“Tubing” – as the method is known in police circles – involves suffocating a victim with a plastic bag or similar object to the point of blackout. Victims of tubing often soil themselves.

During a torture session involving tubing a victim may lose consciousness several times, as the pressure on them to break is ramped up. Victims sometimes feel as though they teeter on the brink of death. And, death by cardiac arrest is indeed a possible outcome, said Steve Naidoo, one of South Africa’s leading forensic pathologists. 

The NY Times article was rooted in an analysis, done in collaboration with Viewfinder, of a government database containing tens of thousands of criminal complaints against police officers. That data was obtained by Viewfinder via successive public records requests over a number of years, starting in 2019.

Screening the complaint details for clear signatures or descriptions of tubing, Viewfinder and The Times identified more than 1,700 such cases registered between 2012 and 2023. Victims often said that they were awakened in the dead of night with police raiding their homes.

Tubing has become a shortcut to crack even petty crimes, whereas before it was reserved for interrogating suspects in only the most heinous crimes.

Some were tortured in front of their families. Often, the police were searching for illegal firearms or other contraband like drugs. Rarely, according to these reports, were victims arrested if none was found.

Several current and former police officers interviewed said they were under immense pressure from above to crack cases and achieve targets for things like arrests and firearm recoveries. Some police officers, they said, believed that tubing suspects would help them achieve their objectives faster.

Their commanders, who benefit from the results that their subordinates bring in, are prone to look the other way. But, experts have long agreed that information extracted through torture is often unreliable.

During apartheid, tubing was used by elite police units including the security branch and the murder and robbery units. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found that tubing’s popularity within the security branch rose sharply in the 1980s.

In one of the commission’s most memorable moments security branch officer Jeffrey Benzien demonstrated the “wet bag” method – a variation of tubing – on a volunteer at a sitting of the TRC in July 1997.

Despite its rising popularity in the closing years of apartheid, tubing was still associated in those times with exceptional circumstances: the interrogation of freedom fighters, or of suspected robbers and murderers.

Indiscriminate torture

In recent years, as the data analysis showed, its use has become increasingly indiscriminate. Tubing has become a shortcut to crack even petty crimes, whereas before it was reserved for interrogating suspects in only the most heinous crimes, said Martin Zulu, a former police detective and current investigator with the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid).

A police officer interviewed in his office at a police station reinforced this point, explaining how he casually slipped a plastic bag over a woman’s head in that very office when she refused to admit to stealing tens of thousands of rands from her employer. Shortly after he began tubing her, he said, she pointed him towards a critical piece of evidence that he needed to prove her guilt.

Senior officers would encourage incoming recruits to participate in small ways, such as holding down a victim’s legs… It was a safeguard against the junior police officers speaking out.

Tubing is furthermore pervasive across the country. Police officers at nearly half of the police stations in the country were implicated in tubing complaints between 2012 to 2023, according to the data.

Still, the caseload of tubing is not evenly distributed between the provinces. KwaZulu-Natal by far accounted for the most cases.

Former warrant officer Patrick Gosling – a once celebrated police officer from Port Shepstone – agreed to speak to his experiences as a police officer in the province. Gosling was jailed in 2017 for murdering two suspects in separate incidents. He was interviewed at Umzinto prison on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. He has since been released on parole.

Gosling spoke about the pressure he and his colleagues were under from his commander to bring in results such as high-profile arrests and firearm recoveries. He spoke about how his unit raided rural homesteads, sometimes on slim information from informants, in search of firearms.

Such unacceptable practices should cease immediately,” the report said. “Those responsible should be subjected to criminal and disciplinary sanctions.

Gosling said he has never tubed people himself, but he witnessed it regularly. Senior officers would encourage incoming recruits to participate in small ways, such as holding down a victim’s legs, he said, so as to learn the ropes and to be implicated in the crime. It was a safeguard against the junior police officers speaking out, he said.

International obligations

The normalisation of torture in some quarters of the police is a serious blemish on the ANC government’s commitment to prohibit the types of human rights abuses its own members were subjected to during apartheid, The Times’ report found. South Africa’s Constitution and laws prohibit torture and the country is a signatory to international treaties which commit it to ensuring torture prevention. 

As part of these treaty obligations, South Africa opened some of its prisons and police stations to observers from the United Nations’ Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (SPT) during a formal country visit between February and March 2023. 

The Times obtained a copy of the SPT’s confidential report to the South African government, sent in December 2023. Cited in this report were several concerns that South Africa was not doing enough to meet its anti-torture treaty obligations. 

At police stations, UN observers interviewed detainees who reported that they had been tortured and “suffocated”.

“Such unacceptable practices should cease immediately,” the report said. “Those responsible should be subjected to criminal and disciplinary sanctions.”

South Africa’s government has not responded to the report’s findings and recommendations, even though it had a deadline of June 2024 to do so.

Analysing the 1,738 tubing cases against Ipid’s criminal and disciplinary outcomes data, Viewfinder and The Times found that in only one of those cases an officer was reportedly dismissed (though he was later reinstated, on appeal). Only six officers were convicted in court. 

Viewfinder’s earlier investigations have shown how police disciplinary processes are vulnerable to manipulation. Middle managers within the police can quite easily use these processes to protect their officers implicated in serious crimes from sanction and accountability.

The police did not respond substantively to a query from The Times detailing its findings on the persistence of tubing within its ranks, with spokesperson Athlenda Mathe saying simply that the police view allegations of torture seriously and have put in measures to prevent it.

This week, Viewfinder submitted another query to Mathe, requesting a response and reaction to the findings published in The Times’ report. She did not respond. DM

Daneel Knoetze is the director of Viewfinder. He co-authored the New York Times exposé on tubing torture in South Africa with The Times’ bureau chief in Johannesburg, John Eligon.