Special Report Transcript Episode 57, Section 2, Time 15:15

Initially I felt a bit sorry for him, on the first day when I saw him because I thought that he had a lot on his shoulders. Ja, he went through a lot himself and he had a lot of things to speak about and he seemed such a lonely figure because there wasn’t anybody with him. He didn’t have any other security branch people, his family wasn’t there and he was basically representing the entire security police almost for that matter. But I also think as time progressed it was also a bit difficult for numerous reasons; he couldn’t remember what had happened and for us that was important to just for him to be able to say, these are the kinds of things that we did to people even if he doesn’t remember the detail. But he could have explained what kind of a process he went through. There was a whole systematic process where you were physically, psychologically tortured for a long period and I mean to the point where after three months, ja I tried to commit suicide. They’d go through a process where breaking your eardrum, giving you a blue eye and then your nose and breaking your lips and eventually knocking you out. And then he takes you for a drive and he’s all dressed nicely and so forth and he says come let’s go. You go for something to eat and he takes me to a shop or someplace and we go have something, he says Kentucky or steak or something and then he says, no you’ve done well and everything was OK and then maybe at two or I don’t know what time in the morning he’ll take you back to the cell again. And the next day at about five, six he’ll come again. What I tried to do is try to block out, not think about it; I’ve never gone for counselling and that kind of thing you know. And I suppose that’s a similar thing he may want to do; I don’t think he wants to think about what he did to people and he, as a form of defence mechanism, maybe even try to block out a lot of those incidents.

Notes: Ashley Forbes

References: there are no references for this transcript