Johannesburg Central Police Station

The Johannesburg Central Police Station is a South African Police Service police station in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa. From its unveiling in 1968 until September 1997, it was called John Vorster Square, after Prime Minister B.J. Vorster.

John Vorster Square was officially opened on the 23 August 1968 by John Vorster, then the prime minister of the Republic of South Africa. It was a 10 storey, blue-coloured cement building. The ninth and tenth floors were occupied by the Security Branch of the South African Police, while the detainees cells were on the lower floors of the building. In September 1997, John Vorster Square was renamed Johannesburg Central Police Station, and the decorative bust of Vorster was removed. It now houses the South African Police Service.

During apartheid, the station was a notorious site of interrogation, torture and abuse by the South African Security Police of anti-apartheid activists, many of whom, after 1982, were held under the Internal Security Act. John Vorster Square was also used as a detention centre mostly for political activists; those sent into "detention" were not allowed to have any contact with family members, lawyers or any outside help; they were cut off from the world. Detention could last for a few hours to a few months, depending on the police.^{[citation needed]}

Of the 73 known deaths of political activists in police custody in South Africa between 1963 and 1990, eight (11 percent) were at John Vorster Square. Government and police officials claimed that the large number of deaths were due to politically motivated suicides, in the words of one police official as part of a "communist plot." These deaths spurred the protest poem 'In Detention' to be written by Chris van Wyk. Even when the reported cause of death was corroborated by an official inquest, civil society largely mistrusted the police's accounts of the deaths. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, police officers and activists testified extensively about the use of torture in detention, and three of the inquests into deaths at John Vorster have since been reopened.

Five of the deaths at John Vorster were recorded as suicides, on which the Commission concluded the following:

[G]iven the extensive evidence of physical as well as psychological torture, suicides under conditions of detention should be regarded as induced suicide for which the security forces and the former government are accountable.

The first detainee to die in John Vorster Square was Ahmed Timol, a 30 year old teacher and political activist and an underground member of the South African Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress. On 27 October 1971, Ahmed Timol plunged to his death from the 10th floor five days after his arrest. The police claimed that he had committed suicide and an official inquest into his death in 1972 backed up this claim, despite evidence that he had been subjected to severe torture before his death. A subsequent inquest into Timol's death in 2017 overturned the ruling of the 1971 inquest, and found that Timol had indeed been murdered by the security police.

The second detainee to die in John Vorster Square was Wellington Tshazibane. On 11 December 1976 he was found hanging dead in his cell. He had been arrested four days earlier for alleged complicity in an explosion at the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg. "An official inquest, much like the previous inquest into Timol's death, exonerated the police of any wrongdoing."