AN INQUEST into the alleged apartheid police murder of South African communist Ahmed Timol reopened in Johannesburg yesterday after 45 years.

The 1972 inquest accepted the police version of events that Mr Timol killed himself by jumping out of the narrow 10th-floor window of the John Vorster Square security services building on October 27 1971 during an interrogation.

More than 70 political prisoners died at the John Vorster Square, with police claiming the deaths were accidents or suicides.

But Judge Billy Mothle said yesterday that prosecutors and the Timol family would present newly discovered evidence to debunk the official version.

The family presented prosecutors with evidence from their private investigation last year. They said it proved magistrate JJ de Villiers was wrong to rule at the first inquest in 1972 Mr Timol had not suffered torture prior to his death.

Mr Timol’s comrade Saleem Essop gave evidence yesterday morning, speaking of the nature of racial oppression under apartheid.

The two were arrested together at a police roadblock on October 22 1971 in possession of banned ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) pamphlets.

Five days later, Mr Timol fell — or was pushed — to his death.

Advocate Howard Varney, acting for the family, said: “According to the police‚ Timol committed suicide in room 1026. This was enthusiastically accepted by the magistrate.

“We will demonstrate that the police manufactured a version to cover the truth. We will argue that the magistrate disgraced the judicial profession and the legal profession.”

Mr Timol, a teacher, left South Africa for Saudi Arabia in 1966, and came to Britain in 1967, where he worked at the Immigration School in Slough and was an active member of the National Union of Teachers.

In 1969 he went to Moscow to study for a year at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism alongside future South African president Thabo Mbeki.

The Foundation for Equality Before the Law — which defended the role of apartheid security officers during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings of the 1990s — has tried to discredit the new inquest.

Foundation chairman JP Botha claimed earlier this month that security services had “no motive” to kill Mr Timol as “he was a valuable source of information.”

He called Mr Timol’s mother Hawa Timol’s testimony to the TRC — that when she received her son’s body, the coffin was filled with blood — “blatant lies.”