Steeped in Blood (23 page)

The battle that rages between private forensic science and state forensic pathology is counterproductive. The two disciplines should instead work hand in glove to investigate crimes. The pathologist should be at the scene of the crime, for example, and in many overseas countries, this is the case. Not so in South Africa. Crime-scene management is appalling in this country, as was the case with the recent investigation into the murder of Inge Lotz (see
Chapter 20
). Unlike the state pathologists, private pathologists usually involve me in their work. Indeed, it is possible for a family to decide to have a private pathologist perform the post-mortem, but the state usually makes this very difficult.

Essentially,
all
pathologists need to be trained to conduct the full
investigation: post-mortems should ideally be a case of teamwork. The enormous risk run by separating forensic science and pathology is that there is potential to overlook critical clues in solving crimes.

‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men … There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.’

– JOHN DALBERG-ACTON (LORD ACTON),

English historian

Captain Dawie Uys spent the last few terrifying minutes of his life fighting to keep SAA Flight 295 in the air. It was a hopeless task, and at seven minutes past midnight on 28 November 1987, the doomed aircraft crashed into the Indian Ocean 134 nautical miles north-east of Mauritius’s Plaisance Airport. On the Boeing 747-244B Combi’s final flight, en route from Taipei to Johannesburg, all 140 passengers and nineteen crew members were killed.

South Africans were devastated by the news. This was undoubtedly one of the great air tragedies in the long history of South African Airways (SAA), and it was also one of the great mysteries
of all air disasters, leaving far more questions than answers in its wake. Even now, more than two decades later, the
Helderberg
crash is shrouded in mystery. It has become my personal quest to find the answers and to unravel the lies and deceit that surround this tragic event.

A board of inquiry was established shortly after the crash, initiating a process that would take almost three years to complete. Judge Cecil Margo was appointed to head the inquiry, and the final report was addressed to the Honourable Minister of Transport and of Public Works and Land Affairs, Pretoria, on 14 May 1990. In my view, this report stands out as the vilest piece of dishonesty in the history of the South African judicial system, and it is a sad chapter in the long, dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.

At the time, Margo was a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal in the Witwatersrand Local Division. During the Second World War, he had been a pilot, flying medium bombers for the South African Air Force. He continued his practice as an advocate after the war and, after some time as a senior advocate at the Johannesburg bar, he was called to the bench, where he served until his death in 2000. Despite occupying the position for many years, he never rose to higher office.

Margo’s wartime flying experience, together with the fact that he had acted for SAA in many of their high-profile cases, made him an obvious choice to chair the inquiry. He had headed up investigations into the crash of the
Rietbok
just outside East London in 1967, and the
Pretoria
accident outside Windhoek in 1968. Margo was also the chairman of the inquiry into the loss of Samora Machel’s flight to Mozambique on 19 October 1986 – a Tupolev that crashed near the village of Mbuzini in Mpumalanga, some way short of the Mozambican border, killing all on board. Within a year, Margo was appointed chair of the inquiry into the
Helderberg
disaster.

My involvement with the
Helderberg
started when I was consulted after the tragedy by the legal representatives of the Boeing
Company. It had been alleged that the passengers and crew of the
Helderberg
had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and Boeing had appointed Advocate Fanie Celliers to safeguard their interests. It was of great importance for Boeing that, whatever else had happened, no finger of blame was pointed at them.

Amidst the wreckage of the aircraft, a few mangled bodies had been washed up on the beach. Tests had been conducted on these bodies to determine the levels of carbon monoxide in the blood. Carbon monoxide is a nasty gas that binds very tightly to the haemoglobin inside the red cells in the blood, preventing the haemoglobin from doing what it should – carry oxygen. The unfortunate victims suffocate to death in the very presence of the life-giving oxygen needed to sustain them.

I was asked to determine whether the test results of the health chemical laboratory were accurate. The problem was that the blood had been mixed with sea water and, once diluted in this way, no definitive test results can be obtained. I gave the theoretical material on the measurement of carbon monoxide to Celliers, who used some of it to cross-examine Dr Hein Schroeder, the state expert who had measured the carbon monoxide levels in the deceased.

It rapidly became clear at the inquiry that there were several camps, each of whom was trying to shift responsibility away from themselves. Boeing didn’t want any blame, the Pilots’ Association didn’t want to be held accountable, and SAA certainly did not want to be seen as being at fault. It was as if no one cared about the cause of the crash as long as their noses were clean. My involvement with the Margo Inquiry ended right there. I never gave evidence and my investigations at that stage were limited to the issues that interested Boeing.

Margo’s inquiry concluded that there had been an intense fire that had started in the right-hand forward pallet of the aircraft, causing the demise of the aircraft, and that it was impossible to ascribe blame to any person or body. Margo spent an inordinate
amount of time on relatively irrelevant issues, like whether there was one debris field or two, and whether the engines were turning when the plane hit the water. He ignored the real questions: namely, the source of the fire, and who had been responsible for loading the material that had caused the fire onto the aircraft.

I suppose the matter would have rested there had it not been for a man called Norman Chandler, who worked under the editorship of David Allen for the
Weekend Star
, one of Johannesburg’s newspapers. The journalist initiated a public debate around the
Helderberg
with a series of luridly written articles, which were published in the newspaper. Chandler popularised the notion that the
Helderberg
was carrying red mercury and that this, somehow, was responsible for the fire on board the aircraft. The articles, which began to appear in early 1995, made sensational reading for months. I have included some of the press cuttings to illustrate the fever pitch of the journalism (see
Appendix E
). In addition to red mercury, Chandler introduced the idea that there had been two fires on board the aeroplane, and that the captain, Dawie Uys, had been reluctant to take off with the dangerous cargo. It was nail-biting reading, but rather poorly researched journalism.

The response was predictable: the
Weekend Star
was hauled before the Press Council of South Africa to face many and varied complaints about this sensational reporting – and this is where the case became intriguing. It would have made sense if these initial objections were brought by SAA, as they seemed to have the most to lose by the reporting. The complaints, however, were lodged by none other than Armscor!

Armscor spent its time creating weapons whose function was to kill other human beings. In the pursuit of these evil ways, it was prepared to stop at nothing, so to defame Armscor would seemingly not be possible, as it had no good reputation to defame in the first place. Yet Armscor saw fit to protest against the newspaper.

Among other things, Armscor complained that certain articles
of Chandler’s alleged that some of Armscor’s procurement officers were ‘international criminals’. Well, had Armscor forgotten about the four people who were arrested in England in the early 1980s and detained pending their trial for trying to buy weapons, thereby contravening the arms sanctions? Had they forgotten that the four were returned for some or other reason, with our government having given an assurance to the British and to Margaret Thatcher that they would all return to stand trial? The detainees never went back, as far as I know. Had Armscor forgotten about the arms procurement officials who were caught attempting to steal plans for a submarine? I am reminded of Eva Perón, who, on one of her many trips abroad, complained to her travelling companion – he had been an admiral – that a voice from the crowd had called her a whore. ‘Madam,’ he reportedly said, ‘it is fifteen years since I stood on the deck of a ship and they still call me admiral.’

Then there was the red mercury issue: Armscor also objected to the newspaper’s allegation that the plausibility of red mercury being on board the aircraft had been confirmed by Dr Frank Barnaby, ‘a top international nuclear scientist’. Barnaby did confirm the
existence
of a substance called red mercury in a conversation with me when I called him while I was doing my research. He referred me to the scientific journal in which the findings of inorganic chemist A.W. Sleight, who had prepared the substance, were published.

Only a single journal article ever appeared about this substance. This usually indicates that it has a military application and is classified information. Barnaby told me that he felt that red mercury was of interest as a neutron-focusing substance – in other words, it could focus a beam of neutrons like a lens. A nuclear reaction is the result of a number of neutrons striking other uranium atoms. If you can focus them, minimising the diffusion of the neutrons, you can get a more intense result for the same amount of effort – in short, more bang for your buck. This is useful if you are
making small bombs with a limited amount of radioactive material in them.

Rumours did the rounds furiously, and debate raged as to the existence of red mercury and the possibility of its being the cause of the air disaster. It was even reported in the
Mail & Guardian
by Robert Kirby that
I
had said red mercury was the cause of the fire aboard the
Helderberg
. This is completely untrue – I never made that statement, and I have always maintained that the red mercury issue had nothing to do with the fire on the
Helderberg
.

Apart from Armscor, SAA also saw fit to lay a complaint with the press council against the
Weekend Star
. They objected to the allegations that certain dangerous goods, destined for the use of Armscor, had been part of the cargo of the
Helderberg
aircraft, and that these dangerous goods had ignited during the flight, causing the air disaster. They complained that SAA was falsely made out to be a co-perpetrator (with Armscor), and protested against the suggestion that SAA had either been a part of or had not prevented an instruction being given by a senior government official to the pilot in command, Captain Dawie Uys, before departure of the aircraft from Taipei. (The newspaper report states that Uys had serious misgivings about dangerous cargo on board the aircraft but was instructed against his will and better judgement to proceed with the flight.) Furthermore, they took exception to the newspaper’s claim that the then chief executive of SAA, Gert van der Veer, or some senior government person, had instructed Uys not to land the aircraft at some intermediate airport after the first fire broke out because, had the aeroplane been allowed to land, its cargo would have been seized by the authorities, revealing SAA’s clandestine involvement in the transportation of dangerous cargo. The scurrilous nature of this allegation was that SAA’s highest-ranking official had callously instructed the pilot in command to risk the lives of all aboard the aircraft. Finally, they took issue with the claim that SAA had, in effect, involved itself in defeating the
ends of justice by intentionally erasing the so-called ZUR tape recording. This tape recording supposedly contained the criminal instructions that were reported to have been given to the pilot.

These few points illustrate the gravity of the complaints laid by SAA against the
Weekend Star
newspaper. At the same time, they illustrate the essence of some of the accusations that I make against both Armscor and SAA and its senior staff in the case of the
Helderberg
.

At the time, I was completely unaware of the ructions simmering beneath the surface, apart from the sensational reporting, which I read along with the general public.

I was approached by Peter Reynolds, who was a senior partner at the law firm Webber Wentzel Bowens, which specialised in media law. They were acting on behalf of SAA
and
the
Weekend Star
newspaper. I had assisted Reynolds previously in an unrelated matter. He enlisted my help and, after outlining the problems with the
Helderberg
case, sent me off to find whatever I could that related to the loss of the aircraft. I was assisted in this quest by the editor of the
Weekend Star
, David Allen.