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Subject:
From:
Dave Manneh <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
The Gambia and related-issues mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 6 Apr 2002 10:06:15 +0100
Content-Type:
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=====================================
Here is another article on Dr Death.

Regards

Manneh
============================================
SA's Dr Death says germ project based on U.S.programme

By Nicole Mordant

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 6 (Reuters) - South Africa's "Doctor Death", the
mastermind behind an apartheid-era germ and chemical warfare campaign
against blacks, said the project was based on a U.S. government biological
and chemical programme. In short excerpts from a filmed interview shown to
Reuters, Wouter Basson said that he had slipped into the United States to
gather information ahead of the launch of South Africa's secret chemical
weapons project in 1982.

The 49-year-old cardiologist, interviewed last Friday in a Pretoria
guesthouse by a freelance film-maker, began a lengthy trial on Monday for
charges ranging from 200 murders to drug-dealing and fraud. He was out on
bail.

In his quest for details on chemical warfare, Basson said he posed as a
draft dodger to ingratiate himself with U.S. human rights organisations in
possession of secrets on the U.S. programme which they were working to
destroy.

"I slowly started to develop a picture of how the whole U.S. chemical and
biological warfare programme was organised," said the balding Basson,
dressed soberly in a dark suit and tie.

He said U.S. air force and army sources unwittingly provided the apartheid
regime with details on how the programme was organised, who was involved,
and what weapons were used.

He also scoured Britain, Western Europe and went behind the Iron Curtain to
get what he needed to make deadly weapons for the white minority regime.

The top-secret programme, code named Project Coast, produced toxins that
could, in theory, have killed millions of people.

"I must confirm that the structure of the project was based on the U.S.
system. That's where we learnt the most," he said.

American film maker Andrew Jones, who said he was negotiating with a number
of foreign television networks for rights to the interview, said Basson had
told him that he had received death threats from American secret agents.

The state's case against Basson, which is expected to take two years to
hear, accuses him of complicity in secret apartheid-government plans to
murder top African National Congress fighters now in President Thabo Mbeki's
government.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman asked to comment on Basson's story said
"We would highly question this man's story. We have safeguards in place that
would prevent any such things from occurring."

CHILLING MURDER CHARGES

The 250-page indictment charges him with making poisoned medicines and beer
used to kill opponents of the white minority government, which was voted out
of power in South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994.

In one chilling account, he is accused of supplying muscle relaxants that
made the victims' lungs collapse. They were used on 200 operatives of the
South West African Peoples Organisation, fighting Pretoria's occupation of
Namibia. Their bodies were dumped into the sea.

Evidence from other scientists, some of them Basson's former colleagues who
will testify against him to get immunity from prosecution themselves, have
placed him at the centre of South Africa's chemicals programme, a charge he
does not deny.

"I was certainly involved in the whole of the project. I can't deny that. I
was the guy who had fingers in the whole pie, the one guy that put the
picture together," Basson said.

There are also allegations that a plot to make black people infertile was
part of the chemicals programme that extended beyond South Africa's borders
to it neighbours Mozambique, Swaziland, Angola and Namibia. REUTERS

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