Special Report Transcript Episode 33, Section 2, Time 02:16

Biko’s interrogation team was headed by Colonel Harold Snyman; it included Brigadier Daantjie Siebert, Warrant Officers Rubin Marx and Johan Beneke and Gideon Niewoudt, better known now as the Motherwell bomber. These men are now applying for amnesty. The missing application is perhaps that of the late Colonel Pieter Goosen, head of the security police in Port Elizabeth at the time and in the eyes of many the man responsible for Biko’s death. The district surgeon, Dr Ivor Lang examined Biko five days before he died and reported that he found no evidence of abnormality or pathology. Neither his report nor that of chief district surgeon Benjamin Tucker mentioned the bruises to Biko’s face, chest, ankles and wrists. They could also not explain their failure to identify the brain injuries that would kill Steve Biko. When he was found collapsed on the floor of his cell, glassy eyed and foaming at the mouth, they drove with him, naked in the back of this van, 12 00 kilometres to the Prison Hospital in Pretoria. He died there on 12 September. The finding of Magistrate Marthinus Prins took three minutes. He concluded that nobody was responsible for Steve Biko’s death.

Notes: Rand Daily Mail ‘A great man dies’ by Donald Woods; Biko funeral; Inquest into Biko’s death, Nov 1977; District Surgeon; Biko funeral ‘Police deny assaulting Biko’; Police van that drove Biko to Pretoria; Magistrate Marthinus Prins