Pretoria | Thursday
APARTHEID era chemical warfare expert Dr Wouter Basson on Wednesday closed his defence case without calling any further witnesses.
Basson has spent more than two months in the witness box, defending himself on 46 charges, ranging from murder and drug trafficking to fraud.
He flatly denied that he had ever been asked or had provided deadly muscle relaxants or other poisons to kill the so-called enemies of the apartheid government of the time and said he had innocently been embroiled in a drug deal, which he knew nothing about.
Concerning a series of highly suspicious business transactions — for which the State claimed funds of the former SA Defence Force were used — Basson said he had done a series of deals on behalf of Libyan, Russian and East German financial principals with the sanction of the then Chief of the SADF, Gen Kat Liebenberg.
Many of the deals, he said, had nothing to do with the SADF’s clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme, but some were ”hijacked” for the benefit of the SADF.
As Basson was a single witness for the defence, the court will have to judge Basson’s explanations against the weight of the evidence of close to 200 state witnesses, most of whom pointed the finger directly at Basson in a series of crimes allegedly committed in the 1980s and early 1990’s.
The trial was provisionally postponed to October 8, when the State and the Defence will give trial Judge Willie Hartzenberg an indication of how they intended to proceed with final argument in the trial.
It on Wednesday became clear that the trial would definitely proceed into next year and that final argument might not even be concluded this year. – Sapa