South Africa convicts ex-apartheid cops for 1987 killing

Two former apartheid-era police officers in South Africa have been found guilty of murdering student leader and activist Caiphus Nyoka nearly four decades after his killing, in a case that highlights renewed efforts to confront unresolved crimes from the white-minority era.

A Gauteng High Court judge in Johannesburg on Tuesday convicted Abraham Engelbrecht and Pieter Stander, both believed to be in their 60s, for Nyoka’s 1987 killing. They will be sentenced at a later date. A third former officer was acquitted.

The case was revived after Johan Marais, a former member of the apartheid police’s Reaction Unit, publicly confessed in 2019 to taking part in the operation. Marais pleaded guilty earlier this year and received a 15-year prison sentence.

Nyoka, a young local activist at the time, was gunned down at his family home near Johannesburg in the early hours of the morning. A 1988 pathology report and court records show he was shot at least 12 times. Forensic findings suggested he was first shot while sitting up in bed, then hit repeatedly after falling back.

Police officers involved in the raid were cleared in 1987 after claiming self-defence — a common tactic used during apartheid to shield security forces from accountability for political killings.

The case resurfaced once before, in 1997, when South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reviewed Nyoka’s death. But no officer stepped forward to accept responsibility or apply for amnesty. The TRC identified thousands of politically motivated killings, disappearances and torture cases, and recommended hundreds for prosecution, though very few ever proceeded.

Renewed pressure from families and civil society has pushed South African authorities to revisit stalled apartheid-era cases. In October, a fresh inquest into the 1967 death of Albert Luthuli, former president of the African National Congress, concluded he was likely beaten to death by security police — overturning an apartheid-era finding that he died after being hit by a train.

Officials have also announced plans to reopen the investigation into the 1977 death of Steve Biko, the prominent anti-apartheid thinker who died in police custody after severe beatings, sparking global outrage at the time.

A separate inquiry will examine allegations that successive post-apartheid governments deliberately blocked prosecutions related to apartheid-era killings.

Nyoka’s conviction marks one of the few successful murder prosecutions linked to abuses committed under apartheid, and could signal a broader push to confront unresolved crimes that have haunted South Africa for decades.