Frank Dutton

Frank Kennan Dutton SCOB is a retired South African police officer. The dominant theme in his career was the investigation and prosecution of people guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, during South Africa's Apartheid era. Dutton's work took place in South Africa as well as abroad. In South Africa, he helped expose the Apartheid military's destabilization machinery, and later headed the Scorpions, the country's elite police force. He also worked with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Nelson Mandela personally thanked him for his service.

Uncovering the Third Force

Trust Feeds massacre

Dutton, with his teammate Lwandle Wilson Magadla, solved the case of the Trust Feeds massacre, a massacre in a village of supporters of the African National Congress in the township Trust Feeds in Natal in December 1988. Taking on the system they worked for, Dutton and Magadla sent a prominent policeman Brian Victor Mitchell to prison for this in 1992, the first senior policeman during the anti-Apartheid struggle to be tried and sentenced. Subsequently, his superiors Ronnie van der Westhuizen and Christo Marx discouraged him and dissolved his unit. But Dutton continued to expose the involvement of the Apartheid-era South African Police hit squads so-called "Third Force" involvement of the South African Defence Force in destabilising large areas of South Africa.