Two forensic pathologists who testified in the Ahmed Timol inquest yesterday agreed he had suffered severe injuries while being held in detention at the then John Vorster Square.
According to the experts, it was impossible for him to have flung himself out of the 10th-floor window of the police station.
Unless he was assisted out of the window, it would have been impossible for him to climb onto the window ledge and jump out, Professor Steve Naidoo told the high court in Pretoria.
He and Dr Shakeera Holland concurred that Timol had suffered a massive depressed skull fracture prior to falling out of the window. This alone would have rendered him in and out of consciousness.
Naidoo detected a further massive fracture to Timol’s left ankle, which would have also made it impossible for him to walk, let alone climb onto the high windowsill.
“In his state he would have certainly not been able to sit up or walk,” Naidoo said.
The two took the stand during the second leg of the inquest into Timol's death 46 years ago. The police maintained Timol had committed suicide four days after his arrest by jumping out of the window of room 1026, labelled the “truth room”.
A magistrate who presided over the inquest in the 1970s agreed with this.
The Timol family, however, asked for the reopening of the inquest because they had not believed he committed suicide.
According to police, Timol had been treated well and was drinking a cup of coffee in the company of Sergeant Joao Rodriguez when he unexpectedly jumped from the window. It was so quick that Rodriguez had no time to stop him.
But the two experts said apart from the fractured skull which would have rendered him incapacitated, he also had a shattered jaw. This would have rendered him unable to talk, let alone drink coffee.
Rodriguez was a big man, Naidoo said, and he could have simply reached out and stopped Timol jumping.
Holland and Naidoo both came to the same findings after studying the 1971 post-mortem reports. Naidoo, however, made an additional finding that Timol had suffered a massive lower leg fracture, which could have been caused by an iron rod.
Holland and Naidoo said they too did not believe it was suicide. Holland said several of the injuries were caused before his fall and these should be explained by his captors.
Naidoo said of the 35 injuries listed, only about 10 were fall-related. The rest were injuries across his body which would not have been caused by the fall, and attributed them to blunt-force trauma.
Holland demonstrated with a plastic brain the skull bone is very thick and would need severe blunt force trauma to shutter it. Both believed Timol was alive after the fall but died shortly after it.