Steeped in Blood (13 page)

I realised that what had, in fact, happened to the canister was that it had been placed on the ground and there had been beaten with a wooden club of some kind.

My findings were quickly drafted into a court report. The police forensic and legal teams then backed off, and Mrs Mkhize was paid some compensation. The advocate handling the matter was Arthur Chaskalson, who was later to go on to become Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. Budlender informed me afterwards that the police legal team had backed off so quickly because there was a decent judge on the bench and due to the high calibre of my report. It was not a case they could dispute.

This was the first politically overt case where the police were taken to task, and it was my introduction to the sort of political police violence that was flooding the country at the time. Many other cases were not as easy to win.

A while later, I was approached by the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town to investigate a series of fires that had taken place in Crossroads, in Cape Town, in 1985. There were two opposing factions in Crossroads at the time – the ‘witdoeke’, who were agents provocateur, secretly employed by the apartheid government to cause mayhem in the townships, and the ‘terrorists’, political groups who were trying to bring about change in the country. Through my investigations, I was able to prove without a doubt that the fires had been started deliberately by the unofficial police agents. The ‘witdoeke’ had fired flares into the humble dwellings, setting them alight. No one was punished at the time.

Around this time, the
Cape Times
published a story about a matter that was to become known as the ‘Gugulethu Seven’ case. Gugulethu is a township on the Cape Flats, and in the days of apartheid rule, it was viewed by the authorities as being a kind of breeding ground for subversive elements.

On the morning of 3 March 1986, a shoot-out occurred between the security forces and a group of ‘terrorists’ at the corner of NY1 and NY111 (Native Yard 1 and Native Yard 111) in Gugulethu. Seven young black men – ‘terrorists’ – were killed. According to police testimony, the police had been informed that an attack by
these terrorists was to take place at this particular crossroad, so they had set up a counter-ambush.

The case enjoyed high media publicity at the time, particularly on television, and we, the public, were entertained by the police commissioner explaining to us just how lucky we were to be protected against the evil performed by the ‘terrorists’, and that we should value the gallantry of the police.

There was another side to the story, though, and
Cape Times
reporters Chris Bateman and Tony Weaver told it, producing an article about the incident that seriously contradicted the official reporting. Bateman had done some prior investigation at the Dairy Belle hostel, which looked over the scene of the shoot-out, during which he had taken some disturbing statements from eyewitnesses. Bateman was completely fluent in Xhosa, the language spoken by most of the black inhabitants of the Cape. The police version of events simply didn’t add up.

Based on their investigation, Weaver gave an interview to the BBC African service, stating that the men had been shot despite the fact that they had surrendered. He reported that they had been lying on the ground when they were shot in cold blood.

This interview resulted in chaos in Parliament. There were calls for Weaver’s blood, and the debates raged furiously, taking up much space in Hansard. Outrage was expressed by the Minister of Police, Louis le Grange, and by Adriaan Vlok, who took over the position after Le Grange had been promoted to Speaker of the House of Parliament.

Amidst the cries for his head on a platter, Weaver was charged with the contravention of section 27(b) of the Police Act, for, among other things, unlawfully publishing untrue information relating to this particular shoot-out. Brigadier Leon Mellett, who was the personal secretary to Vlok, attended the trial, which was held before Magistrate J.M. Lemmer.

I was contacted by Jonathan Gluckman, the private pathologist
who had been involved in the Steve Biko inquest. By 1984, Gluckman had started to dabble in forensic science and was doing postmortems.

Weaver had employed the legal firm of Findlay & Tait, with Gordon Rushton and Jeremy Gauntlett acting as the legal team. Gluckman had been briefed on the forensic work, but he felt that the ballistics, which involves studying the dynamics of the relevant projectiles, was too far outside his field of expertise, and so passed the work on to me.

I flew to Cape Town and consulted with the legal team at Gauntlett’s house in Llandudno. Bits of string were produced and trajectories were measured, with various members of the legal team acting as the deceased. Angles were estimated. At the end of the consultation, I flew back to Johannesburg with various photographs and post-mortem reports to begin my real work.

Two of the deceased were of particular interest to me. One had very different types of wounds – a protracted blackened strip across the small of his back and a grievous wound through the fleshy part of his buttocks. The second was a man who had fled into some nearby bush and had been tracked down and shot by a policeman called Warrant Officer Barry Barnard, a particularly brutal and nasty product of the apartheid police force. This man had been shot in the face and had had part of his jaw blown away by the shot.

I set up experiments using fresh pig heads and tried to reproduce the results seen in the post-mortems. Pigs are the tried-and-tested animals for use in forensic ballistic tests. The skin is almost identical to human skin and, consequently, the test results are much more comparable to the effects seen on human skin than they would be if any other animal’s skin was used.

The police version was very simple: they had been given prior intelligence about the ambush and had set up a counter-ambush. A number of statements had been compiled under oath for the inquest into the death of these unfortunate men.

The statements were themselves quite interesting. They had been compiled by a single individual: the grammar, diction and syntax showed that this person had gone to considerable effort to make the versions neatly dovetail with each other. Normally there would be slight differences in the accounts given by people, particularly when caught up in violent and distressing events, as these surely were. Yet the policemen’s statements were all beautifully turned out, with not a hair out of place. The problem with them was just that – they were too perfect. In addition, I had done a great deal of research into the Weaver matter, and the police versions simply did not fit the frightful injuries to the deceased.

These statements did have one important benefit for the defence team: they resulted in each policeman being saddled with the version that he had given under oath. This was to have unfortunate consequences for the police.

Having conducted in-depth research into the injuries of the deceased, I recognised that there were several inconsistencies between my findings and the versions laid out in the police statements.

The man running through the intersection from right to left, and who was shot by one particular officer, had no bullet wounds on his left, but only from his right, and those were not made by a weapon matching the one carried by the police officer.

The man who was pursued by Barnard and shot twice in the head while allegedly turning to shoot at Barnard from some twenty metres away, was in reality killed from a distance of under a metre. A photograph of the deceased reveals the devastating injury produced by the discharge of a shotgun at close range. When I tested this on a pig’s jaw, the similarity of the wound produced on the jaw was quite apparent, with all the features of a close wound (see
photo
). Not only was the blackening reproduced in my test scenario (caused by the unburnt propellant from the shot), but the shot had been fired from such close range that the pellets did not have time to spread. These details matched the injury of the deceased.

All the angles of the shots were in conflict with the police versions. A photograph of the deceased who had a long, blackened burn mark across the small of his back showed this wound clearly. He could only have been shot at point-blank range. At the subsequent inquest, however, the state pathologists stated that this was an abrasion caused by a bullet fired from a distance, which had tracked across the man’s skin. Yet a bullet abrasion looks completely different. There can be no doubt that the state pathologists were prepared to twist the evidence and perjure themselves to suit their political masters and the police.

During the Weaver trial, not only did it come out that the police had lost vital pieces of evidence, as was reported in the
Argus
of 3 August 1987, but none of the state forensic experts gave evidence. This was peculiar: normally the state is obliged to lay out all its evidence, and in this case the ballistics and other forensic evidence were of crucial importance to support the police’s version of the story. Yet there were no state forensic experts to be seen; they were not even present to aid the prosecutor in cross-examining me or Johan van der Spuy, who assisted in giving evidence about gunshot wounds in general. The state experts put in an appearance several years later only, at the second inquest – and not to give evidence, but primarily to assist the prosecutor in cross-examining me.

This was something that always bothered me about this case, and about others, too. The function of a court expert is to assist the court in coming to the correct conclusion. As I mentioned in
Chapter 4
, the expert is not there as some sort of hired gun to assist ‘his’ side, as it were. Experts do not have a ‘side’ – they are equipped with only the truth, as far as it can be ascertained.

During the trial I prepared large diagrams of the crime scene. Each policeman who had participated in the shooting was asked to place himself on the plan and to indicate which of the deceased had been killed by him. In doing so, they claimed to have shot the men at a distance. Yet it could be shown that many of the wounds
were contact gunshot wounds, which are created when the muzzle of a weapon is really close to the skin when the shot is fired. This was proved in all seven instances, and showed that the inaccuracy of the police version of the incident – an ambush and shoot-out – was untenable. The carefully doctored affidavits prepared by the police were thrown into total disarray.

There could only be one result: Weaver was acquitted and left the court a free and very relieved man. For me, it counted as another black mark against my name as far as the state was concerned. The head of the police laboratory detested me: General Lothar Neethling was an arrogant, harshly militaristic type of person, and he marked me down for special attention after the Weaver trial.

I interacted with Neethling often over the years, and his dislike of me seemed to grow with time. He was a German war orphan who was brought out to South Africa after the Second World War and rapidly rose through the ranks of the police force. He was no fool, and started a modern police forensic laboratory in 1971, the first of its kind in South Africa.

At heart, though, Neethling was a political animal. He loved to parade around in his medals, enjoying the pomp and ceremony. I recall the first time I ever spoke to him – it was in 1984, before I became involved in any serious political cases. I had attended a lecture of his and made a point of approaching him afterwards. ‘Colonel Neethling,’ I said, ‘I want to start a forensic laboratory, and I am sure we will have dealings with each other.’

His reply to me was: ‘I would say you are stone deaf, because I am a general, not a colonel.’ I was a little taken aback, but that was the man as I soon came to know him. I could not understand the basis of his intense dislike for me in the beginning, and the real reasons only dawned on me some time later, when the full extent of his hatred for me became apparent and the police atrocities mounted up.

A couple of years after the trial, I was informed by the police that
a new inquest into the death of these seven men had been ordered, and I received a subpoena to attend the hearing. These unwelcome instructions to attend court for criminal trials and inquests were a bane of my life in those days. Invariably, the inefficiency of the court wasted a great deal of time and the state paid expert witnesses R18 per day. The state pathologists delighted in my discomfort.

I appeared at the new inquest, which was held in the Wynberg Magistrates’ Court. The presiding magistrate was Magistrate Hoffmann, and a battalion of medical minds grilled me. Jurie Nel, a professor of forensic medicine at Tygerberg Hospital, acted as assessor, and I was questioned by Pietman Mostert, a senior public prosecutor at Wynberg Magistrates’ Court, retired professor of forensic medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT), L.S. Smith, Theo Schwär, a current professor of forensic medicine at Stellenbosch, and Deon Knobel, successor to Smith at UCT. They never took me on single-handedly in those days; they came in brigades.

The result of this inquest was quite predictable. Hoffmann made a few mild disapproving noises about the police falsifying affidavits. The government pathologists attacked each and every part of my evidence, and the end result of all this was predictable: there was ‘no one to blame’.

These were frustrating days for me, and it was to be many years before I was vindicated in this and many other matters. The vindication came only during the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) amnesty hearings, when the full, squalid truth came out. We had all believed at the time that the entire episode at Gugulethu had been a police set-up, that weapons had been planted on the deceased, and that the entire affair had been seized upon by the propaganda machinery of the SABC.

It’s so sad when the state goes bad. It was admitted at the TRC hearings that the entire event had, indeed, been set up. The group of unwitting young black men had been infiltrated by government
agents, and the plot hatched by a greater force operating in the country at the time – the men of Vlakplaas, home to the ‘death squads’ of the eighties and early nineties.