Skip to main content
Menu
♥ Donate
eventREF E-0012585Revised

Event record

Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody

Date
5 May 1985
Updated
30 Sep 2019
Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody

Seventeen-year-old activist and leader of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), Sipho Mutsi, died in police custody during interrogation at the Odendaalsrus prison. A lawyer, Richard Spoor, announced that a state autopsy showed that Mutsi had died of brain haemorrhage caused by a blow on top of his head. The minister of law and order, Louis le Grange, ordered an urgent probe into Mutsi's death.

Search events by date

What happened on your birthday?
View more events from this day

How we know this

  1. 01(Coleman, M. (ed)(1998). A Crime Against Humanity: analysing the repression of the apartheid state, Johannesburg: Human Rights Committee, p. 245.)

Last updated · 30 Sep 2019

Cite this entry

South African History Online. (2011, March 16). Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody. South African History Online. https://sahistory.org.za/ref/E-0012585

South African History Online (2011) 'Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody', South African History Online, 16 March. Available at: https://sahistory.org.za/ref/E-0012585 (Accessed: 4 August 2026).

South African History Online, Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody [website], https://sahistory.org.za/ref/E-0012585, (accessed 4 August 2026).

"Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody." South African History Online, 16 Mar. 2011, https://sahistory.org.za/ref/E-0012585. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

South African History Online. "Sipho Mutsi dies in police custody." South African History Online. March 16, 2011. https://sahistory.org.za/ref/E-0012585.

Further reading

SAHO is free because readers fund it. Donate →