Steeped in Blood (16 page)

He kept altering the background, commenting that it made a huge difference to the size of the contact shot. When he used a sandbag and fired a contact shot, he found he could get a calibre-sized hole in the clothing. The reason for this is clear: a sandbag has a porous surface, which would allow the weapon to be held firmly in place. This did not apply to what had happened to Ashley Kriel.

Later, the magistrate questioned the state expert, who confessed that with all the shots where he used a pig-belly background, he produced only large blown-out holes quite unlike the one on the tracksuit of Ashley Kriel. The magistrate asked, ‘[S]o it is only with the sandbag that you got the same effect as with a contact shot as that seen on the deceased’s clothing?’

‘Yes,’ responded the expert.

There can be only one explanation of the forensic evidence placed before the court, and it tied up with the theory that I had formulated: Ashley Kriel was gunned down in cold blood by Benzien. Realising that he would need an explanation, Benzien had lifted Kriel’s clothing and fired a second shot through the existing bullet hole, this time in contact, to give support to the story that there had been a struggle.

One would have thought that the ‘evidence’ given by the police expert would have vindicated me and caused an embarrassing refutation of the state version of the story. Not so. Not one of the four state pathologists raised a single criticism of the nonsense spoken by the state witnesses. It beggars belief, but such was the mindset of the time.

Deon Knobel conducted an experiment in court: he pressed the weapon against his arm, and it left muzzle marks. All Knobel’s experiment did was show that the muzzle would leave impressions on the skin. This was perhaps innovative, but it was completely immaterial, as there had been clothing between the muzzle and Ashley Kriel’s body.

One of the tenets of science is that like always has to be compared with like. In a controlled experiment, the scientist eliminates variables, keeping constant the element he or she wants to investigate. This was clearly a loose-contact shot – there was a gap between the muzzle and the skin. (The further away from the skin the weapon is on firing, the more debris is visible on the skin.) So why did the state pathologist test for a close-contact shot?

Why did he change the background, when pigskin, as I have mentioned, was and still is widely accepted as the closest to human skin for ballistic experiments? He also tested only on a skin that had no clothing over it. It was ridiculous experimentation and completely irrelevant. Four senior men sat there and said nothing about how unintelligent the experiments were.

Cross-examination was interesting: they had to ensure that they were right, so they ignored scientific evidence to prove their point. They wanted to prove that the shot that had killed Kriel was a contact shot, and not a loose shot, and they could do that only with a sandbag. It didn’t prove their point, in my view; it just illustrated their stupidity, or their blind determination to prove the police story. None of the so-called expert advisors said anything about using a sandbag. Interestingly, too, no comment was made on the number of bullets found in Kriel’s body. There should have been two bullets if my hypothesis is correct.

These pathologists sat in the bench and said nothing. I felt as helpless at the Ashley Kriel inquest as I had at that inquest of the Gugulethu Seven.

Equally sad was the findings of the inquest magistrate, who seemed to be more intent on protecting the police than finding the truth.

The outcome of the Ashley Kriel inquest was that no one was to blame – as I’ve said, a common outcome in many of the political cases in the 1980s.

An interesting footnote to this saga was played out in front of the TRC. Benzien features on the cover of Volume 2 of the TRC’s final report, where he is photographed holding a bag over the head of a person in a demonstration of how he had obtained ‘free and voluntary confessions’ from the people he arrested. This was known as the ‘wet bag’ approach: a suspect was made to lie on the ground with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Benzien would then sit on the small of his back, with his feet between the suspect’s
arms. A bag soaked in water was pulled over the suspect’s head and twisted tightly around his neck, cutting off the air supply. The suspect was then questioned. From time to time, the bag was released to avoid the victim losing consciousness. It was removed only when he showed signs of wanting to talk. Benzien claimed to get a confession within thirty minutes or so every time he used this approach! Each and every time a confession was obtained, Benzien would have gone to court with it, and he would have sworn under oath that the confessions had not been obtained by illegal means.

Truth had no meaning for the boys in blue during those dark days. I was once asked by a judge, ‘Well, doctor, why would this policeman lie?’

I longed to reply, ‘My lord, just to keep in practice.’

Of course, to give such an answer was unthinkable before some of the judges of those days, just as it will become again in the not too distant future if we are not careful.

At the TRC amnesty hearing in 1995, it was found that Benzien did not convey a clear picture of the events or the sequence in which they occurred. There were inconsistencies and even contradictions on some aspects, one of them being that it was not clear whether Kriel was shot while he was attempting to get up or when he was standing. Nor was it apparent whether Benzien had climbed onto Kriel’s back when the shot went off (see
Appendix D
).

What is beyond doubt is the fact that Kriel was initially shot through his clothing, as Benzien alleged and testified. This must lead then to the fact that there was a second shot, which was fired without clothing between the muzzle of the pistol and the skin. Kriel was murdered, and Benzien lied about the events.

The ANC’s legal team was ineffectual in their cross-questioning at the TRC hearing: they didn’t come close to exposing Benzien. His version of the events that had played out that day in July 1987 was quite different from the report given at the inquest. I was upset at the time, as I felt that Benzien had not told the truth, not only at
the inquest, but also at the TRC hearing. It was concluded that it was possible that Benzien had not intended to kill Kriel, but that he was negligent in the way he had held the youth with the pistol in his hand while Ables was trying to handcuff Kriel.

Jeffrey Benzien was granted amnesty for the killing of Ashley Kriel. It is an enormous travesty that Kriel was denied justice by the TRC.

‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’

– DAVID HUME,

Scottish philosopher and historian

On 15 October 1985, a group of policemen burst out the back of a truck in Athlone and started firing on the crowd, wounding and killing several people in the process. The so-called ‘Trojan Horse Massacre’ is well documented in the history of the struggle against apartheid. It was, however, one of the few occasions that I made a glaring error – an error I learnt from and have never repeated.

On that fateful day, a group of anti-apartheid protesters were gathered at the corner of St Simon’s and Thornton Roads when a railway delivery truck drove down Thornton Road. Hidden in the wooden crates at the back of the vehicle were members of the police force and the South African Defence Force (SADF). The truck passed the crowd, where some serious stone-throwing was taking place.

The security forces suddenly emerged from their hiding place, and, without warning, began firing into the crowd with automatic weapons. Most people scattered, but three young people, Michael Miranda (aged eleven), Shaun Magmoed (aged sixteen) and Jonathan Claasen (aged twenty-one), were gunned down and killed. A further thirteen adults and two children were injured.

The whole ambush was caught on camera and was broadcast both locally and internationally, causing an outcry among anti-apartheid supporters worldwide.

An inquest into the incident took place in March 1988, at which the magistrate ruled that the actions of the police had been unreasonable. The police were found to be responsible for the deaths. The case was then referred to the Attorney-General of the Cape, who refused to prosecute.

South African legal history was made when the families of the deceased decided to launch a private prosecution. Provision is made for this in the Criminal Procedure Act, and I was called in to investigate on the families’ behalf.

The police had used shotguns, which are capable of firing ammunition of varying sizes. Birdshot cartridges contain large numbers of very small lead pellets, which do not travel very far and will cause very little damage to a human when fired at a range of thirty metres or more, unless the victim is struck in the eye or in a superficial large blood vessel. The same shotguns are capable of firing much larger ammunition, the so-called AAA and SSG ammunition, also known as
skerppunt ammunisie
– sharp-point ammunition. These cartridges contain fewer but larger lead pellets and are much more lethal over greater ranges than birdshot.

One of the crucial issues in the Trojan Horse trial concerned whether the police had used this larger variety of ammunition or the smaller, less damaging kind. The police records showed that the police had been issued with the birdshot type of ammunition. Unfortunately, the police records were not always accurate – it
was not unusual for police officers to pocket some of the larger, more deadly ammunition to use at their discretion.

I was able to examine one of the survivors of the random shooting, a young child. He had a pellet lodged in the upper part of his leg, in the femoral groove near to the femoral artery, the large blood vessel supplying the whole leg. It was easy to see the object pulsate as the artery pulsed. The piece of lead embedded in his thigh was considered too dangerous to remove under local anaesthetic. The child was very lucky that the shot had not penetrated this vessel, as he would almost certainly have bled to death on the scene.

This situation reminded me of my experience with the Kannemeyer Commission some years before. The Eastern Cape was a political hot-spot at the time, with some serious political unrest taking place. On one occasion, the police had opened fire on a crowd that was being troublesome, wounding a small boy called Kwanele Moses Bucwa in the head. This resulted in the boy being paralysed. The police claimed that they had fired into the air and on the ground and that, if anything, this was a piece of shrapnel from a ricocheting bullet. I was called to give an opinion on the metal lodged in the child’s skull. I was able to take X-rays from the side, from the front and from the top to the bottom of this bit of metal, getting a three-dimensional view. On each X-ray, the object appeared to be circular.

An X-ray is a shadow cast by the object of interest, and only one shape will cast a circular shadow seen from three different aspects at right angles to each other: a sphere. A piece of shrapnel from a ricocheting bullet is most unlikely to form a sphere – I have seen many such pieces of twisted and tangled metal. The most likely item to have produced the metal in Kwanele’s head was a shotgun pellet, which had to have been fired at him directly. This was in conflict with the police evidence. I went to see the professor of radiology, and we were able to show that the object in the child’s head had lodged there as a result of a direct shotgun hit on the
head. It was large ammunition – probably
skerppunt ammunisie
, which has the ability to wound and kill.

I was rather pleased with myself that I had proven this. In the cross-examination, counsel could show that they had fired directly at the child.

Now, after the Trojan Horse Massacre, I faced the situation of the metallic fragment in the young child’s leg from the police’s firing at him. Of critical significance was the size of the pellet: my X-rays of the leg showed that the fragment was considerably larger than the birdshot claimed to have been issued to the police.

I was faced with an interesting problem. I could get side-to-side X-rays of the leg, as well as front-to-back views, but, because of the awkward position of the fragment, I could not obtain a third view. I worked out the film focus of the X-ray machine – an X-ray magnifies as the beam moves from the X-ray tube and can make an item appear larger than it is. Looking at the X-ray view, and calculating the extent of magnification, the object seemed round. Based on my reasoning, and without the benefit of a third view, I assumed that the parent shape had to have been a sphere. That assumption was incorrect, as it turned out.

The whole matter came to trial and was heard in the Cape Town Supreme Court. In my evidence, I gave all my reasons for concluding that the larger and more lethal shot had been used. A radiologist from the Stellenbosch University medical school gave evidence to counter my testimony. I was cross-examined by Flip Hattingh, who had made a name for himself in acting for the police. He also later acted for Eugene de Kock in a marathon trial in Pretoria.