Steeped in Blood (15 page)

After a long trial, Judge Johann Kriegler ruled in favour of
Vrye Weekblad
. The appeals court overturned Kriegler’s decision on a legal technicality, and ordered the paper to pay R90 000 plus costs. The ensuing battle cost both sides two million rand over five years, and forced the paper to close. Neethling was free. I have never understood why Michael Corbett C.J. reversed the court’s initial findings.

Judges were bending over backwards to fulfil the needs of the government. Because of my involvement in a number of political cases, on request, I became known as an ‘ANC man’. However, I never took sides and was not a member of any political party. I simply conducted my investigations to the best of my ability. In some cases, the police were right: if the evidence stood up to scrutiny, I would not waste time and money refuting it.

I would never manipulate evidence or create a defence for a person, though. In recent years, I was approached by a man accused of the illegal manufacturing of drugs. He showed me all of his equipment and chemicals, and I asked him how he had obtained them and what he used them for. In response, he asked me, ‘What could I have been doing with these chemicals and equipment?’ He was looking for a defence – a valid excuse as to why he had all the chemicals and equipment in his possession. I would not sit and
dream up something in order to invent a defence for him. I told him that it didn’t work that way – he should tell me what he was using it for, and I would let him know if his explanation was feasible or not. In the end, the man was found guilty and his house was one of the first to be seized by the asset forfeiture unit.

The various murders, torture and disappearance of individuals in the 1980s took place behind the cover of massive government propaganda. Most South Africans were blissfully unaware of the truth that lay behind these horrors. This blindness was truly reprehensible in those groups who should, by virtue of their training and position, have known better. The state forensic practitioners saw evidence of the atrocities arriving in their mortuaries every day. The evidence of torture and assault was there to see, yet they chose not to see it.

As a newcomer to the forensic scene in the eighties, I could recognise the gaps in the story; I could see that the police versions could never explain the forensic evidence. The state forensic experts were in a better position than I was, but they never raised the alarm. They failed in their duty as professionals and as human beings. They allowed gross abuses of human rights to continue and, as a result, in my view, they join those in the trash can of history, people like Joseph Mengele and the other Nazi doctors and professionals who chose evil over good.

There was one notable exception to all this. Wendy Orr was a young district surgeon in the Eastern Cape who had found herself in the position of having to pay back student loans. The Department of Health had seconded her to the area where Doctors Tucker and Lang were working. They had been involved in the Steve Biko inquest, and admitted later to having behaved in a manner that was contrary to their Hippocratic Oath – they had protected the security police and, by their actions, had allowed abuses of prisoners to take place.

Not so Wendy Orr. She lodged complaint after complaint against
the rampant security police abuses, which she saw on a regular basis as part of her duties. The existing forensic infrastructure should have sprung to her assistance. They did nothing of the sort – there was not a single word of support for her courageous actions. Not even Tucker and Lang, who should have learnt from their past mistakes, gave her a single iota of backing. That was unfortunately the state of the official circles at the time.

Other examples of state abuse covered up by the authorities included the mysterious disappearance and death of Siphiwo Mtimkulu, who had been poisoned with thallium while in prison in 1981 by the security forces. Frances Ames, who was a neurologist in Cape Town, became involved in the matter. She was outspoken and made public her findings. Of course, nothing was done. Ames, together with Trevor Jenkins, Philip Tobias and three other doctors, later raised the matter of Tucker and Lang’s involvement in the Biko inquest and forced the Medical and Dental Council, the statutory registration body that had exonerated the doctors, to take some belated action against the pair.

These were not isolated actions: the unholy alliance between the state pathologists and the police was played out, yet again, in the killing of Ashley Kriel.

___________

*
Despite the excellent cross-examinations of the security police and the doctors who were involved in the 1977 death of Steve Biko, which revealed that Biko had been in custody when he died, that he had been chained naked in a puddle of his own excrement and driven in this form to Pretoria, and that he had suffered a severe head injury brought on by vicious assaults by the police, the magistrate found himself unable to lay the blame for Biko’s death at anybody’s doorstep.

‘Science is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles.’

– EDWARD O. WILSON,

American biologist, researcher and theorist,

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

On 15 July 1987, Ashley Kriel, a curly haired, intense and funloving youth, had his life cut short, just a few months before his twenty-first birthday. His death shocked his own community as well as the broader public, and he is recognised today as one of the tragic victims of the struggle against apartheid.

While growing up in Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, Kriel was painfully aware of the impact of gangsterism in the community. Together with two friends – Gavin Adams and Paul Jansen – he set up an alternative to gangs for the youth, a movement called the GAP brotherhood. The acronym derived from the initials of their first names, but the aim of the group was to provide a ‘gap’ for youngsters through which they could escape gangsterism. Interestingly,
Kriel was taught by Cheryl Carolus, who rose to prominence and high government office after 1994.

Being an active community member, the implementation of the tricameral system of government in 1984, which excluded the vast majority of South Africans, led to Ashley Kriel establishing a network of revolutionary militants who debated and explored alternatives to what the apartheid government was proposing. He became one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Movement (UDF), and left South Africa in 1985 to join the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

Kriel was seen by the community as an agent of change, but the authorities viewed him as a serious threat to the stability of the country: a powerful orator, he was able to stir up crowds and cause significant unrest. Something had to be done about him.

The ‘problem’ of Ashley Kriel was permanently solved by a particular Western Cape policeman, Warrant Officer Jeffrey Benzien. Acting on a tip-off, Benzien went to the house in Athlone where Kriel was staying. According to the police report of the incident, Kriel produced a firearm and, in the ensuing struggle, Kriel was shot in the back.

The official story, which was reiterated in Benzien’s submission for amnesty in 1995, at the TRC hearings, goes as follows:

On [15] July 1987, Benzien and Sergeant Ables went to 8 Albermarie Road, Hazendale, Athlone. They had been instructed to do surveillance of the house and its immediate vicinity as the police had received information that Ashley Kriel, a trained ANC terrorist, might be hiding out there. He and Ables went to the house disguised as municipal employees pretending to check the sewerage … Sergeant Ables knocked at the [back] door. Moments later a man opened the door. Benzien immediately recognised him as Ashley Kriel. Kriel held a jersey and towel in front of his
trousers in his right hand and his left hand was pressed against the covered right hand. Benzien told him that they had come to inspect the drainage on the property. Kriel said nothing and tried to get back into the house. Benzien suspected that Kriel might be armed with a pistol or hand grenade, so he moved quickly, put his arms around Kriel’s arms and chest trying to pin his arms to his body. Benzien identified himself as a policeman and told Kriel that he was arresting him. In the process the towel and jersey fell off revealing an automatic pistol in Kriel’s hand. Benzien disarmed Kriel and struck him a heavy blow on his forehead causing him to fall to the floor. Sergeant Ables then tried to handcuff Kriel, but Kriel sat up and grabbed Benzien’s right hand in an attempt to retrieve his pistol. While Ables was trying to handcuff him, Kriel suddenly stood up, but Benzien held him from behind with the pistol still in his hand.

Then a shot went off and Kriel fell to the ground. He had been wounded and blood came out of his mouth and nose. Ables handcuffed Kriel while Benzien went to his vehicle and radioed for help. When Benzien returned, he found that Kriel was dead.

–
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report
, AC/99/0027

According to Benzien, he and Ables then searched the house for weapons, only to find a hand grenade under the pillow on Kriel’s bed. Benzien insisted that it had not been their intention to kill Kriel, but merely to arrest him, and that the shooting had been accidental.

Kriel’s family was not happy with the official explanation, and I was requested by them to investigate the matter. I flew to Cape Town and started my work.

The wound on Ashley Kriel’s back was clearly a contact wound. It would have to be in order to support the police version. Because
the pistol had been in contact with the skin on firing, it had left black burn marks on the skin in an elliptical shape.

There was only one difficulty: Kriel had been wearing a tracksuit top at the time he was shot. I called for it, and discovered that a neat calibre-sized hole was located in roughly the right position. Kriel had been shot with a .22-calibre automatic pistol. I managed to secure the pistol from the police and took it back to Johannesburg with me, where I researched the types of ammunition available and then started my experiments.

Using the same ammunition and the same type of clothing involved in the Kriel killing, I again enrolled the help of a pig because of its skin’s similarity to human skin. Covering the pigskin with identical clothing to Kriel’s, I fired a contact shot.

The results were spectacular. Any shot fired with the muzzle of the weapon either in contact with or at very close range to the skin, with the clothing interspersed, produced a whopping great hole in the material. The reason for this was quite simple – the clothing was made from cotton polyester, through which a huge hole burnt as the heat spread from the muzzle of the weapon. Yet, when I inspected Ashley Kriel’s clothing, the hole was not more than half a centimetre across – the size of the bullet. I repeated the experiment a number of times, but could not get a calibre-sized hole in the garment when I fired at close range. It was impossible to recreate the alleged contact shot that had killed Kriel without simultaneously blowing a great big hole in the tracksuit top.

Interestingly, the state pathologist didn’t comment on the bilateral abrasions that Kriel had on each wrist. These clearly indicated that he had been handcuffed while alive. It was obvious that this story did not add up.

The only explanation I could think of was that he had been handcuffed and Benzien had fired a shot from a distance, which had hit Kriel in the heart and killed him. Benzien then realised that he had a problem: how could he admit to having shot a handcuffed,
unarmed man? Based on my findings, I speculated that they had lifted Kriel’s top, put the gun against his skin through the same hole, and fired a second shot. That was my version, anyway, but it was extremely difficult in those days to appear in court and allege that the police had murdered someone.

I was present and testified at the inquest, which was held in the Wynberg Magistrates’ Court in May 1989, with the same judge on the bench who had ruled that there was ‘no one to blame’ in the Gugulethu Seven case. The prosecutor was again Mr Mostert, and the whole forensic establishment was out in force, including Deon Knobel from UCT, and my old adversary Theo Schwär, who was there to aid the magistrate in assessing the technical evidence. Assisting was Jurie Nel, forensic pathologist at Tygerberg Hospital, as well as Lionel Shelsley Smith, the former head of pathology at UCT.

The police were aware of my version and were desperate to counter it at any cost. The state called on a police ‘forensic ballistics expert’ to argue against my evidence.

Amazingly (or not), the police expert freely admitted under cross-examination that he kept only that data which suited him. In this case, therefore, he had fired some 180 to 200 shots, and selected those that corroborated his theory.

In the court record of the case, this police expert states that ‘he wanted to get a hard contact shot on the “right background” without getting a large torn hole in the clothing’. A little later on, he says that he ‘began to realize that whatever was behind the clothing played a huge role in the effect of the shot on the clothing’.