Windhoek | Friday
APARTHEID-ERA germ warfare expert Wouter Basson, who has been acquitted on 46 charges in South Africa, may still stand trial for atrocities in Namibia, Foreign Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab said on Friday.
”For us the matter will not rest until we see justice done,” he said a day after the acquittal, adding that Namibia might consider applying to extradite Basson to stand trial.
”We know, and this was confirmed by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, that as part of apartheid South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme, Basson and his cohorts eliminated more than 200 Swapo (South West African People’s Organisation),” Gurirab said.
Basson’s acquittal was a ”scandalous and monumental travesty of justice,” the minister said.
Six charges against Basson, including three charges of conspiracy to commit murder in Namibia in the 1980s, were dropped at the start of the marathon 30-month trial in the Pretoria High Court.
Those charges alleged that Basson was involved in the poisoning of some 200 Swapo detainees in an internment camp and the death of five other detainees at a military base who were injected with muscle relaxants.
All the bodies were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aeroplane.
Basson was also accused of being involved in a plot to kill Namibian public servant Peter Kalangula by smearing poison on his car door and a plan to contaminate the water supply of a Swapo refugee camp outside Windhoek with cholera.
The charges against Basson were dropped because of a general amnesty to all apartheid soldiers, issued by South Africa’s administrator in Namibia on the eve of the country’s independence in 1990.
Until then, white South Africa had waged a war against black nationalists in the country.
Asked whether the amnesty would make it difficult for Namibia to try Basson, Gurirab said that he would not ”honour that question with an answer”.
”We are an independent, sovereign state now, so those proclamations are irrelevant now,” he said. – Sapa-AFP