Ahmed Timol was an anti-apartheid activist, political leader and activist in the underground South African Communist Party, based in Roodepoort, near Johannesburg. He died five days after being arrested at a roadblock in Johannesburg, following torture and beatings. Police claimed he leaped out of window on an upper floor of the John Vorster Square police building, and were exonerated in a 1972 inquest. The claim was widely disbelieved at the time, and a 2017 judicial review of the case declared that he had, instead, been murdered.