OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday
ENOUGH chemicals to make 3,5 million Mandrax tablets were discovered during a stock check at a former SA Defence Force front company in 1995, the Pretoria High Court trial of chemical warfare expert Dr Wouter Basson has heard.
Willem Nel, a chartered accountant who worked for Sentrachem, which bought the front company Delta G in 1993, told the court that several blue drums containing 820kg of pure methaqualone were discovered in the check.
It was presumed that the drums were the property of the SA Police’s Forensic Laboratory, which was asked to remove it, he said.
Keith Morris of the police’s forensic laboratory said in a statement that it had never made any drugs available to any private individual or organisations. The drugs were only provided for training purposes.
Confiscated chemicals were kept under lock and key until the criminal trials involved were concluded. They were then destroyed, Morris said.
A former technical manager at Delta G, Gerald Cadwell, testified that 1200kg of Mandrax was manufactured in the late 1980s. He did not think any of the operators knew what they were making.
According to Cadwell, Delta G received a ton and a half of Mandrax for extraction purposes.
A former business manager at Delta G, Barry Pithey, said the Mandrax came from the SAP’s forensic laboratory.
At one stage the laboratory had given Delta G about 200kg of Mandrax, which had to be “reworked”.
Pithey also tried to manufacture a precursor for making Ecstasy. The product was of a poor quality and their attempts, in Pithey’s garage, were “not terribly scientific,” he said. His understanding was that the product would have been sold to Basson if successful.
Pithey knew that Delta G later had a project to manufacture several thousands of rands’ worth of Ecstasy. He said he never knew why Ecstasy had been made and had never asked why.
Pithey conceded that the manufacturing of all substances at Delta G was properly done in terms of proper requests by the Defence Force. He said the activities could therefore not be regarded as untoward.
Dr Charles Psotta, a chemist who worked for both Delta G and Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, manufacturing chemical substances, said Basson had directly tasked him to manufacture a main ingredient used to make Mandrax.