Special Report Transcript Episode 68, Section 6, Time 47:09

Dr Francis Aims was head of the University of Cape Town’s neurology department when a severely ill Mtimkulu was sent to her at Groote Schuur Hospital in November 1981. // He was on discharge after five months in prison with only the police having access to him. He was ill immediately after discharge. His family in Port Elizabeth were extremely distressed. He was childlike with pain, actually crawled into their bed that night weeping with pain and seemed strangely confused in his behaviour. He clearly had neurological involvement, not only of the brain but also of the nerves affecting his limbs, particularly his legs. Having had experience of arsenical poisoning, examined his hair repeatedly for arsenic and like the Port Elizabeth group, continually failed to find it. Fortunately for him, he survived long enough to develop a pathognomonic sign of thallium poisoning, which is falling out of the hair. We had great difficulty in actually setting up the tests for thallium, we had to invoke the help of the organic chemists at UCT and he was once tested. He was unequivocally poisoned with thallium. // Tell me about thallium. Why is it such an efficient poison to use on a human being? // Well, it’s known as the homicide’s dream drug; it’s colourless, it’s odourless, it’s tasteless. The symptoms don’t develop for at least a day sometimes longer after it’s been ingested. // Could he have gotten in the poison any other way, like by accident through food or getting in touch with something? // Not at all. The only people who had access to him were the security police, the relatives were never allowed to visit. And a quite extraordinary fact is that South Africa was virtually the only Western country that never permitted thallium in rodenticides. It’s so toxic that it was being used as a rodenticide, and is still in use in the Middle East, before people realized its dangers. But extraordinary that South Africa had never permitted it. So the idea that a thallium infected rat could have entered his cell is ridiculous. // To your mind, is there any doubt that Siphiwo Mtimkulu was poisoned by the security police? // None at all. I was told by the professor of forensic pathology who phoned me when the case got a lot of publicity. He phoned me to say the forensic department, in particular Lothar Neethling, wanted to congratulate my department on making the diagnosis and could they have my permission to get specimens of the patient’s urine and blood and hair because they had acquired sophisticated equipment at the military laboratory and wanted to see how well it worked. I said certainly, as long as we were told the results so that we could correlate them with ours and waited several weeks without getting any results. I asked the forensic pathologist and he said, would you believe it, the specimens were dropped on their way to the airport?

Notes: Dr Francis Aims; Max du Preez; Aims

References: there are no references for this transcript