S. Africa Police to Probe ‘Torture Camp’ : Apartheid: Black activists have told of abuses by officers at a rural house, and two detainees died.

For nearly two years, a tidy, four-room house with a covered front porch and a paved sidewalk in the rural white community of Welverdiend has been known among black activists as a police “torture camp.”

A dozen youngsters told The Times last year that they were blindfolded, given electric shocks and beaten at the house. And two youths--15-year-old Eugene Mbulawa and 16-year-old Nixon Phiri--died while being questioned there. Police blamed both deaths on epileptic seizures.

But after a year of strong denials, the regional police commander now has announced that he is forming a special investigative team to look into allegations of torture at the Welverdiend house.

“Any irregularities are unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” the Western Transvaal commander, Maj. Gen. J. G. de Waal, said in a statement Thursday. A police spokesman, Lt. Burger van Rooyen, added: “If there is something wrong there, we will see to it that this will end.”

The house is headquarters for the Welverdiend Police Investigation Unit, a five-man team of plainclothes riot officers. Police said the head of the unit, Warrant Officer J. G. van Graan, had been replaced, but none of the officers in the unit has been suspended.

Until this week, police had dismissed all suggestions of torture at the house. Questioned by The Times last year, Van Graan, his commander Col. H. E. Austen, a spokesman at police headquarters in Pretoria and the Transvaal attorney general all categorically denied the allegations.

At the time, Austen said, “As far as I’m concerned, we have no problem with Welverdiend.” Van Graan attributed the allegations to “some blacks who don’t like us.” He was speaking during an interview at the house, which was spotless except for a single brown shoe that lay inside the front door.

Black anti-apartheid activists in the area have said they are routinely beaten and subjected to electric shocks to the genitals in the interrogation rooms at the house, about 40 miles west of Johannesburg. But the most notorious cases involved Nixon Phiri and Eugene Mbulawa.

Phiri was being questioned about the burning of a van when he died in January, 1990, from a sharp blow to the head. The police contended that Phiri had an epileptic seizure and fell against a file cabinet. However, Phiri’s mother and his aunt said the youth had no history of epilepsy, and a private autopsy found numerous abrasions and bruises on his body.

“I’d be very surprised if an epileptic seizure caused all those injuries,” said Dr. Jonathan Gluckman, who did the autopsy. “I’d say he was very badly beaten up.”

A judicial inquest in February ruled Phiri’s death accidental. Lawyers for the family, notified of the inquest 10 days later, were not present.

Eugene Mbulawa died in July, 1990. William Makgatje, 15, who was present during Mbulawa’s interrogation, said a white policeman and two black policemen forced Mbulawa to stand with his palms on a desktop and his feet on the floor. Then they repeatedly kicked Mbulawa’s feet out from under him.

Soon Mbulawa was unconscious. Ten hours later, the police took him back to a holding cell. Later, he was taken to a local hospital, where police told the nurses that Mbulawa had suffered an epileptic seizure. He died the next day without regaining consciousness.

The state autopsy concluded that Mbulawa had died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a single blow to the head. A veteran pathologist who saw the autopsy report said it was likely that a boot or shoe caused the fatal injury.