Pretoria | Tuesday
WOUTER BASSON, the mastermind behind apartheid South Africa’s chemical warfare programme, on Monday denied having supplied potions to kill liberation fighters from the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo).
Basson (51) was contradicting testimony by a former fellow soldier in the Pretoria High Court that Basson had given him deadly muscle relaxants to kill Swapo fighters before they were thrown ino the sea from aircraft.
Johan Theron had claimed that hundreds of Swapo fighters captured by the apartheid military in now Namibia had been smeared with the substances so that they would suffocate before being dumped in the Atlantic Ocean.
“I never received such a request and never supplied such substances,” Basson said. “I had no reason to supply such substances to Theron and I never did.”
Basson said he could furthermore not see why victims would have to be killed first before being thrown into the sea from 12_000 feet (4_000 metres) as the water was as hard as concrete from that height and victims’ bodies would have “broken into pieces.”
The heart surgeon has been dubbed Dr Death for his allegedly lethal experiments and is facing 46 charges ranging from murder and fraud to drug offenses relating to his covert work for the former white regime.
On Monday he told the court that although he had worked with substances so lethal they could cause death in minutes, he had only used them for research and as teaching aids when training clandestine operators.
He said special agents received cyanide capsules “as part of their standard issue” in case they were caught, but this was an old and standard military practice.
He also shrugged off testimony by another former military operative that he had supplied him with a substance which caused a man to start bleeding profusely the next day.
He said the victim must have been assaulted or fed glass, because substances that caused that induced bleeding only began working after three to five days.
It was Basson’s sixth day in the witness stand in a trial that began in 1999.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges but coolly admitted spying and developing weapons for the apartheid regime.
Last week he told the court he had researched the use of drugs and animal hormones for crowd control and secretly bought military equipment from companies in Libya, East Germany and the Soviet Union, then laundered the money to pay them in the Cayman Islands.
On Monday, he also confirmed that he had arranged for a series of deadly James Bond-like gadgets to be made for former defence force chief Kat Liebenberg, including poison-tipped screwdrivers and umbrellas.
Basson is due to be cross-examined by prosecutors on Tuesday. – AFP
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