Steeped in Blood (20 page)

I went to see his landlady, who informed me that on the night of the fire he had been out the whole evening, but that he had told her to sign an affidavit stating that he had been there that night. When she’d asked him why she should lie, he had said to her that it was police procedure. Clearly he didn’t have an alibi.

I took a statement from the landlady and confronted the police with it. The way in which they dealt with the matter was extremely underhanded: they sent another policeman to speak to the landlady, confusing her with different time-and-place facts and causing her to doubt her own initial affidavit. They thereby neutralised her
statement to me. Taking all the evidence into consideration, I concluded that the truth was that the policeman, either alone or with accomplices, had set fire to the building in an attempt to wreak revenge on the troublesome children.

The matter went to an inquest before a magistrate in Pretoria, and became a mere repetition of many other inquests of its time. The prosecutor, who was supposed to be a neutral leader of evidence for the state, was aggressively biased. The magistrate was viciously pro the police. In the end, the police were never brought to task and the outcome of the inquest was a non-event: predictably, no one was to blame. Like the Ashley Kriel inquest, like the Cradock Four case, like the David Webster assassination – like so many others – it was a travesty of justice in my opinion; a sham aimed at exonerating the police.

Of course, one cannot ignore the fact that there were political overtones in this case, which involved a white policeman and black children. Proper justice would have meant the prosecution of the white policeman, yet in those days it was not considered a
real
crime to kill a few black children – a tragic reflection of the times. The police knew about the various incidents that had occurred over the years – Khotso House, the murders, the hit squads – yet there prevailed an apathetic attitude that permeated investigations concerning black people.

The way in which the Elim church fire was handled led to an increased cynicism on my part. These seemingly pious individuals – regular churchgoers, supposed upstanding citizens of society – were entirely dishonest when it came to matters of a political nature.

In an ironic twist, the state threatened to prosecute Jeremy Kruger, the man who ran the Elim orphanage, for culpable homicide, because some of the doors had been locked and the children had not been able to get out. This would have been an extremely unfair prosecution; they were simply trying to turn the tables to find a scapegoat.

Around the same time, in 1992, I was involved in another politicised case where we actually emerged victorious. I was approached about a matter concerning a black child who had been caught stealing by a farmer. To punish him, the farmer had handcuffed the boy and welded him to a steel table. The farmer had then carried on welding close by, and the boy had caught alight. He was badly burnt. The farmer claimed it had been an accident, and that he hadn’t known that the boy would catch alight.

The police were being their usual disinterested selves in the investigation, walking around smiling and paying lip service to the whole process. Mark Froneman, who was leading the police’s forensic investigation, was not making any satisfactory headway, so I was called in by the law firm Deneys Reitz.

The child had been doused with petrol. During the welding, the sparks that had flown towards him had caused his clothing – a woollen top – to ignite. I decided to conduct an experiment, filming it with a video camera. I was able to show evidence in court that one could weld near a woollen top and sparks would not set it alight. (This, incidentally, is why firemen used to wear thick woollen coats.) If an accelerant such as petrol was added, however, the top would quickly ignite from the sparks.

The farmer’s actions had been intentional, in my opinion. It was an important victory for us when the farmer was found guilty in court: it demonstrated that slowly the wheels of justice were starting to turn.

Sloppy police work almost prevented justice from being served in a truly frightening incident in which a plot had been hatched to expend black lives for financial gain. The Witbank Kombi Murder took place in Witbank, east of Pretoria, in 1992, when a group of black people in a burning Kombi plunged over the edge of a cliff. Five or six of the passengers were burnt beyond recognition.

The police investigation was totally incompetent: the police even went so far as getting one of the accused to interview a survivor. I
was asked by the Legal Resources Centre to investigate the matter, and the story was chilling. Some unscrupulous insurance salesmen had offered employment to a group of black people, and had insured their lives as part of the deal. Shortly afterwards, these men were found in a burnt-out Kombi at the bottom of a cliff.

During my investigation, I was horrified at the sheer brutality of what I found. The Kombi had been prepared for the murder: there were no handles on the inside of the doors, so no one could escape; petrol had been poured over the vehicle; and it had been set alight before being pushed over the cliff.

As the investigation progressed, the whole sordid plot was exposed. I am not aware that any prosecutions occurred in this terrible case – once again, no one was held accountable. The days of shoddy police investigations and cover-ups were beginning to come to an end, but they were not entirely over yet.

‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’

– ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN,

Russian novelist, historian and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The cracks were beginning to appear in the apartheid government’s armour, and I, along with many others, welcomed the truth with open arms. The Harms Commission of Inquiry into hit squads, the CCB and the mockery of justice was a sham, however. Louis Harms was and still is a good judge, but I fear he was a prisoner of his own ideology. A good, solid Afrikaner, he could not believe, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that his own people could possibly have committed the atrocities that were being alleged.

Despite Harms’s findings, people were starting to run scared. Sparked by those coming out of the woodwork – starting with Butana Almond Nofemela, who blew the whistle on Vlakplaas (see
Chapter 9
) – various inquiries sprang up, and the whole can of worms, including the inner workings of the CCB, slowly began to creak open. Nofemela’s admission started the slow leak that became a widening crack, until the floodgates burst open, with more and more former operatives coming out with the truth.

In spite of this, the tradition of foul play was still alive and well in the world of forensic science, and I was not immune to these dirty tricks. I viewed Lothar Neethling, the head of the police’s forensic laboratory, as an intensely evil person – I believe that he perverted science in the name of a political agenda, and that is unforgivable. He and many others did not see it that way, but I believe in honest and truthful scientific applications.

Drug cases brought me into close contact with Neethling, and he used these opportunities to make my life as uncomfortable as he could. In 1988, I worked on a big Mandrax case, defending a group of drug dealers who had set up a Mandrax factory in Kempton Park, Johannesburg. The business had been operating smoothly until one of the dealers boasted about it in a pub one evening. The police were tipped off, and the entire business was seized – right down to the vehicles that were used to transport the drugs.

During its period of operation, this factory had produced a massive amount of Mandrax – estimated at around R186 million in value at the time. It was a huge case for the police. The drug industry was a cash-rich business, and when the police entered the home of one of the drug bosses – the Castle, in Roodepoort – they found themselves literally neck deep in cash!

I was approached by the drug dealers to act in their defence, and I accepted. The police claimed that the substance they had seized was Mandrax, and I had to determine if this was the case. To do this, I needed a sample from the state of the seized drugs so that I could
test to see if it was, indeed, Mandrax. They refused, saying that we had to obtain a court order. Louis Virtue, the magistrate, granted us the court order, and I proceeded to take samples, followed around by Lieutenant Twigge, Neethling’s
handlanger
, who then took samples of my samples.

The very next day, I received a visit from the police and a representative from the Medicines Control Council (MCC). My registration with the MCC permitted me to be in possession of certain illicit drugs in order to test them scientifically. The policeman and MCC representative had a warrant for my arrest, claiming that I was manufacturing illicit drugs.

The drugs that they were referring to actually arose from a previous case I had worked on. An Indian woman had been stopped at the airport and her luggage searched. Two two-kilogram packets of brown powder were found – presumably heroin. I had approached Neethling to obtain samples of the substance, so that I could test the brown powder against known heroin.

Testing for a drug is a complex procedure, and there are various ways of doing it, using a combination of methods. The first step is to conduct a paper chromatography test: a small spot of the solution of the drug is placed onto a chromatography plate, which is a very thin layer of silica stuck to a thin glass plate. A line is drawn across the plate about a quarter of an inch from the bottom, and the drugs are ‘spotted’ at regular intervals.

The plate is then placed into a solution of volatile substances, such as benzene or pentane, and the ‘spotted’ substances move up along the plate, much as a piece of paper would absorb water. This is called a ‘capillary effect’. Different substances move at different speeds, so as they move up the plate, you can get a presumptive idea of what the substance is – whether it is tea leaves, sugar or something that comes from the family of opiates.

The second step, in those days, was to shine an infrared light through the substance and measure the wavelength and intensity of
the absorption of the light using an infrared spectrometer. The pattern of light absorption would give an indication of the substance, as each chemical compound has its own pattern of absorption.

Today, a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer is used, which consists of a tiny oil-coated tube. A gasflow of nitrogen or helium is sent through the tube, into which a minute amount of the substance being tested is injected. It is carried by the flow of gas through the tube, and as it comes through the other end, it flows over a detector. The time it takes to pass through the tube will indicate what substance it is. Here one is measuring the retention time, of which each drug has its own.

Another method is to use a mass spectrometer as a detector. This test is much more definitive. Effluent from the end of the tube is fed into the mass spectrometer, where it is bombarded with electrons. This fragments the molecules and they shatter. If the same strength of electron bombardment is used, the molecules will always shatter in the same way, depending on the chemistry. These fragments can be picked up as separate entities by passing them through a magnetic field, which produces a fragmentogram – effectively a fingerprint of the substance under investigation.

Before embarking on any drug testing, it is important to run a sample of the known substance to ensure that your equipment is working and to make a comparison with the unknown sample. You also want to make certain that you get the same results – in other words, compare the fragments of your substance to the fragments of the known substance – in the case of the powder found in the Indian woman’s luggage, heroin. So it was important for me to have a sample of heroin before I could embark on any testing.

I was having difficulty obtaining the legal sample of heroin that I needed. Eventually I managed to track some down through the United Nations drug control centre. It was not easy to find an airline to transport it for me: eventually Lufthansa agreed, but they could not get it to me in time.

I was under pressure from Neethling, who wanted the heroin case wrapped up so that he could attend the opening of Parliament. As I desperately needed the heroin to conduct my tests, I decided to manufacture it myself – I am a chemist, after all. It was not difficult, and within a few hours I had 100 milligrams of the purest heroin. When I compared the brown powder found in the Indian woman’s luggage to the known heroin, it was clear that it
was
, in fact, heroin that she was transporting, and not herbal tea, as she claimed.

So the unexpected visit from the policemen and MCC representative just after I’d obtained samples of the substances seized during the Mandrax factory case arose because I was in possession of heroin that I had manufactured myself. In that quantity, however, I was entitled to possess it. Neethling was just trying to make life difficult for me. The matter was sorted out easily with a few phone calls to the magistrate and the then Deputy Attorney-General, Kevin Attwell. I was never prosecuted, and the matter died a natural death. The incident showed to what lengths the man would go. He tried a similar trick later on, but that was also quickly quashed by Kevin Attwell.