Special Report Transcript Episode 36, Section 2, Time 06:16

The story of pure self defence against a group of super armed men just does not hold. Eye witnesses have testified about some of the deceased being shot at point blank range. This is borne out by Doctor David Klatzow, an independent forensic expert who testified at the trial of Cape Times journalist, Tony Weaver. // Very unlikely, very unlikely that the ballistic patterns that I saw on the … and I reported on, would have been a general wholesale shootout. There were some of those wounds which were clearly the wounds inflicted at close range. Now if somebody is shooting at you, you don’t snuggle up to him in order to dispatch him. You shoot from a distance. So I have some difficulty with that version and that is the photograph of… the post-mortem photograph of the body with the peculiar marks across the small of the back. That in my view is an entrance wound, it has every characteristic of an entrance wound and that has every characteristic of the mark made by the muzzle flash of the weapon as it is discharged at very close range. These incidentally are shot gun pellets in the same individual; there’s a variety of wounds that each individual sustained. If one looks at the tests that I conducted using pigskin one can reproduce the marks using a similar weapon and one could probably become more exact on one’s reproduction of the marks had one used the same weapon. The third one, of great interest is the man who became known as ‘Wad man’ and the reason he became known as ‘Wad man’ was because embedded in his brain was the wad of a shotgun cartridge. That’s a shotgun cartridge. It was also very interesting that if one saw that he had the angle of the, the angle of his jaw had been blown away completely with blackening around the edge. It was a jagged wound around the angle of his jaw and that again is consistent with a shotgun fired at very close range. The ballistic experiments which I performed at the time was shown and one can reproduce that damage to the pig’s jaw with a close range shot within a few centimetres, if the muzzle is closer than 10, 15 centimetres to the jaw one can get that kind of a result with the blackening that was all too apparent on the photograph of the deceased.

Notes: Dr David Klatzow

References: there are no references for this transcript