Accused in Police Torture Case Considers Plea Deal

Juma Igiranieza was assaulted during a raid at his barbershop in November 2023.

The torture case against three South African Police Service (SAPS) officers was postponed at the Wynberg Regional Court in Cape Town on Wednesday after the court heard that one of the accused wants to enter into a plea agreement.

Lawyers for Colonel Delmore Manuel told Magistrate Karel Meyer that they would like a postponement in order to submit a proposal to the court about a plea agreement.

Manuel is accused alongside Constable Jermaine Conradie and Constable Leigh-Ann Maroon of assaulting Juma Igiranieza, a barber, during a raid at his workplace, Perfect Touch Boutique and Salon, in Mowbray on 7 November 2023.

GroundUp published CCTV footage on 10 November showing several officers, one in plain clothes, assaulting Igiranieza. In the footage, at least two officers participated directly in the assault, while other officers looked on. Igiranieza was pummelled, struck repeatedly with a wooden object, and smothered with plastic.

Igiranieza sustained a laceration of the right eyebrow, a tear on the lower lip and swelling around the left jaw, according to the report of his medical examination after the assault. He was at court on Wednesday but did not go into the courtroom.

The three officers were arrested on 22 April 2024, and are currently out on R2,000 bail each.

In their last appearance in October, lawyers for all three said their clients would plead not guilty.

Meyer granted the postponement on Wednesday to 12 June for a possible plea agreement.

GroundUp asked Western Cape police spokesperson Frederick Van Wyk whether the officers were still on active duty. He had not replied by the time of publication. But he has previously said: “It is our policy to conduct a departmental investigation following any misconduct or criminal investigation against a member of SAPS, however this is an internal process between the employer and the employee and dealt with as such. Due process regarding disciplinary actions are under way.”

According to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate’s (IPID) annual report for the 2023/2024 financial year, 3,176 complaints of assault were reported to the police during the year. “Of these, 3,176 were assault cases, 621 were cases of complaints of discharge of an official firearm(s), 460 were cases of deaths as a result of police action followed by 273 cases of torture and 212 deaths in police custody.”

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.