GRUESOME testimony before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has provided support for the African National Congress's contention that police were responsible for some "necklace" executions during the armed struggle against white rule.
These executions, in which a flaming tyre was placed around the victim's neck, brought notoriety to the ANC in the 1980s.
In its submission to the TRC the ANC devotes attention to attacks carried out by the security forces which were made to look as though they were the work of ANC guerrillas.
"Certain attacks on civilians - including necklacings - were carried out by agents of the apartheid state in their continuing attempts to damage the ANC," it claims in its submission.
Since then, a former security policeman, Paul van Vuuren, one of five Pretoria based former security policemen who have applied for amnesty for more than 40 murders committed in the 1980s, has told an amnesty committee of how a captured activist was necklaced.
The activist was first throttled with wire in the back of a police vehicle. He was then driven to a deserted road, where his body was doused in petrol and a car tyre placed around his neck.
"He was set alight," Mr van Vuuren said. "It was supposed to look as though he had been necklaced. I suspect he was already dead when the petrol and tyre were put on him."
His testimony coincided with an ANC statement signalling its intention to present further evidence of how police propaganda sought to discredit the movement in the 1980s. Warrant Officer van Vuuren's testimony is not the only evidence linking police to necklace killings.
In his account of his days as the commander of a police death squad, Dirk Coetzee tells of how the bodies of several victims were burnt. Gen Herman Stadler, who headed the police intelligence unit at the height of the undeclared war, dismissed as "mere propaganda" attempts by the ANC to deny responsibility for necklace killings.
The police might have attempted to present their killings as necklacing on a few occasions, he conceded in an interview with The Irish Times. But they accounted for only a small fraction of the number of people who were necklaced or burnt to death by the ANC, he said.
Police figures show that between September 1984 and December 1986 a total of 406 people were killed in necklace executions and another 394 burnt to death.
The main targets were not ANC activists but men and women deemed to be collaborators and informers, including policemen, township councillors and, on occasion, even ordinary folk whose enthusiasm for the cause was thought to be deficient.
In 1986 Mr Alfred Nzo, then the ANC's secretary general and now Mr Nelson Mandela's Foreign Minister, justified the necklacing of collaborators. "Whatever the people decided use to eliminate the enemy element is their decision," he said. "If they decide to use necklacing, we support it."
In 1985 a young woman, Maki Skosana, was attacked by a frenzied crowd in Duduza, east of Johannesburg. She was beaten and kicked and when she fell to the ground a stone was thrown at her head. She was then necklaced because of her suspected friendship with a renegade ANC guerrilla, Joe Mamasela.
At a recent hearing of the TRC's human rights violation committees Ms Skosana was posthumously cleared of the charges against her after her sister's testimony.