"They are legal gangsters, that's what I can say about the police today."
These are the words of Clyde Choolan, a fish vendor in Cape Town who claims he was one of more than 40 men kidnapped and tortured by police a decade ago.
Choolan, from Tafelsig in Mitchells Plain, said the men were rounded up after the 2009 shooting of street committee member Mervyn Jacobs, whose murder remains unsolved.
Investigating officer Anthony Lindt said he released the men because their alibis checked out, but many of them were repeatedly rearrested and held for 48 hours each time.
He said the arresting officers were led by Maj Gen Jeremy Vearey, then commander of the Mitchells Plain police station and now Western Cape deputy commissioner in charge of detectives. Vearey is one of the candidates tipped to replace provincial commissioner Lt Gen Khombinkosi Jula, whose transfer to KwaZulu-Natal was revealed last week by the Sunday Times.
At least seven men lodged criminal complaints against Vearey and his officers, but no action was taken.
Bradley Hess and Mario Abrahams, who were charged with Jacobs's murder, had their cases thrown out when Lindt told the court that the man who pointed them out at an identity parade had been intimidated into doing so.
Lesley Jones told the Sunday Times he was taken to a beach in Macassar by a group of police officers and shown pictures of Hess and Abrahams.
"They asked me how deep I can swim. The one officer took his gun out of his holster.
"He kept showing me the pictures on his phone of Bradley and Mario," said Jones.
Lindt said Vearey interfered with his case, especially when he started getting close to two men he believed were the killers, hitmen acting under the command of 28s gang boss George "Geweld" Thomas.
In a Radio 702 interview after a Sunday Times report in March - which quoted some of those arrested as saying they had been beaten up by police - Vearey claimed there was a smear campaign against him by "a rogue unit".
"I think the impression is created that we went off our head here and just went about kidnapping gangsters … and just went on a torture spree," he said.
Police spokesperson Brig Vishnu Naidoo said charges - understood to include defeating the ends of justice - were being investigated at a national level.
"I am not at liberty to confirm or deny which cases these are or who the complainants are or which person or persons is/are being charged," he said.
Former prosecutor Gerrie Nel said the use of torture to obtain evidence was "not only immoral but can serve no just purpose. Unconstitutionally obtained evidence will [usually] be inadmissible during a trial."
Police who used coercion would be likely to perjure themselves in court, he said.
"This becomes a slippery slope which cannot be permitted in the criminal justice system of our constitutional democracy," Nel said.
Johan Burger from the Institute for Security Studies said torture happened when the police were too ineffective and unprofessional to solve cases using lawful investigation techniques.
"Research over the years internationally has shown that the most successful investigations are done when you don't use these methods," he said.
"You can't add any value to what the person is telling you under these conditions because the principle is simply that someone who is subjected to extreme coercion and pain will do anything to bring an end to it."
Vearey did not respond to Sunday Times inquiries.
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