OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Friday
CHEMICAL warfare expert Dr Wouter Basson and others involved in the SADF’s chemical and biological warfare programme were “despondent and upset” after throwing millions of rands worth of drugs and mortars into the sea, the Pretoria High Court has heard.
Mr H, a military intelligence officer who may not be identified because of his “sensitive” work overseas for the present government, testified that Basson had in 1993 approached General Dirk Verbeek, the former head of Military Intelligence, for help in connection with the destruction of substances which formed part of the SADF’s chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast.
South Africa was about the sign the International Non-Proliferation Treaty at the time.
Mr H was given orders to assist Basson and afterwards had to compile a report of substances that were thrown into the sea at Port Elizabeth.
According to Mr H, 112 drums were already loaded onto a truck, covered with tarpaulins and guarded when he arrived at 7 Medical Battalion to pick up the substances.
The truck was driven to the Waterkloof Air Base where the drums and between 30 and 40 mortars were loaded onto an airplane. The contents of four of the drums were tipped into the sea, and the rest were thrown in, drums and all.
Basson had taken samples from four of the drums in front of Mr H and afterwards also handed him three further samples, but Mr H did not know from which drums and when those samples were taken.
Mr H said he had asked Basson several times what the contents of the drums were, but Basson did not tell him.
Afterwards, Dr Basson, Dr Wynand Swanepoel and Dr Phillip Mijburgh, who accompanied them on the trip, were despondent and upset, because the work of so many years was destroyed.
The samples were taken to the police’s forensic laboratory, where they were analysed by the head of the laboratory at the time, Dr Heinrich Strauss.
Dr Strauss testified that some of the samples contained cocaine, methaqualone (used to manufacture Mandrax) and Ecstasy.
He said that the laboratory had at one stage given large quantities of methaqualone, confiscated during a huge drug bust, to Coast front company Delta G.