South Africa wants retrial for 'Dr Death'

[emad]

Independent
By Meera Selva, Africa Correspondent
24 February 2005


The South African government has asked the Constitutional Court to re-try an apartheid-era germ warfare specialist, nicknamed Dr Death, who has been accused of murdering political opponents under white rule.

Wouter Basson, who earned the epithet for his expertise in developing poisons, avoided prison in 2002 when the High Court in Pretoria acquitted him of 46 charges, including murder, drug trafficking and theft. He had been accused of trying to create "smart" poisons that would affect only blacks, and manufacturing enough cholera and anthrax to start epidemics.

He is also said to have ordered black political prisoners to be tied to trees and smeared with a poisonous gel to see if they would die. If they survived, they were killed by muscle relaxant injections.

He also developed sugar laced with salmonella and anthrax cigarettes. South Africa's chemical and biological warfare programme was the first to have been so publicly exposed and is thought to have been the most lethal of its kind at the time.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=614129

[gratuitous]

1. Incredible

You read about vermin like this, and then you see and hear Bishop Tutu. Why Tutu isn't standing over the mangled corpse of Wouter Basson, pummeling it with a baseball bat and screaming with rage, is almost beyond me.

But then I remember I'm a Christian and not a Republican, and I know why Tutu doesn't do that.

[emad]

2. I wonder if this paragon of ingenuity ever donated as a Bush

"Pioneer"?????

[Igel]

3. Does SA have a double jeopardy provision? n/t

[DulceDecorum]

4. No, that's how and why this all happened in the first place.

The whites could do as they bloody well pleased
and they were a sadistic bunch.
Besides which Basson did NOT receive a fair trial.