An ex-mercenary claims that a South African group has tried to spread AIDS | News from the world

A group of mercenaries based in South Africa was accused by one of its former members of trying to intentionally spread AIDS in southern Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

The claims are made by Alexander Jones in a documentary that premieres this weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. He says he spent years as an intelligence officer at the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), three decades ago, when he was directing blows. State and Other Violence Across Africa.

The film also explores the unexplained killing of a young rookie of the SAIMR in 1990, whose family was allegedly murdered because of his work on a group-led AIDS project in South Africa and Mozambique.

And he also claims that the group leader at the time had a racist and apocalyptic obsession with HIV / AIDS. Keith Maxwell wrote about a plague that, he hoped, would decimate black populations, cement the white rule and bring back conservative religious mores, according to documents compiled by the filmmakers.

Maxwell did not have a medical degree, but ran clinics in poor, mostly black areas around Johannesburg, while claiming to be a doctor. This gave him the opportunity to experience sinister, says Jones in the movie, Cold case Hammarskjöld. The filmmakers were investigating SAIMR because he had claimed the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld, then secretary general of the UN.

"What easier way to get a guinea pig than [when] you live in an apartheid system? Jones said in the movie. "Blacks have no rights, they need medical treatment. A white "philanthropist" arrives and says, "You know, I'm going to open these clinics and I'm going to treat you." And during that time [he is] the wolf disguised as a sheep. "

A billboard "Dokotela [doctor] Maxwell "is still hanging at an office in Putfontein, where people remember a respected man with a near monopoly of health care in the area. He offered strange treatments. especially by pbading "tubes" to patients, which allowed him to see inside their body. He also gave "false injections," said Ibrahim Karolia, who ran a shop on the other side of the road.

Any interest that Maxwell showed for AIDS in public was benevolent. Claude Newbury, an anti-abortion doctor who knew the mercenary leader, confirmed that he had no medical qualifications, but described a committed humanitarian. "He was against the genocide and he was trying to find a cure for HIV," Newbury told the filmmakers.

weird Johannesburg Sunday Times interview with a "SAIMR" signboard for teenagers, Debbie Campbell, in August 1989, shows the picture of a teenager with a halo of curls, taking measurements of water pollution and also discussing research a cure for HIV / AIDS. But the healthy image has a sinister nuance. She says she was recruited out of school at 13 and it is hard to imagine any interest that an international mercenary group could have in recruiting prepubescent girls.

The documents compiled by the filmmakers seem to show that Maxwell's private views were very different from his public personality. The documents suggest a macabre pleasure in the advent of an epidemic. In one he writes:[South Africa] could have a man, a vote with a white majority by the year 2000. Religion in its conservative and traditional form will come back. Abortion on demand, drug abuse and other excesses of the 60's, 70's and 80's will have no place in the after-AIDS world.

Newspapers read like the feverish dream of a man who aspired to be South African Josef Mengele. There are detailed, sometimes confusing stories about how he thought the HIV virus could be isolated, spread and used to target African blacks.

What is less clear is that he had the expertise or the funds to implement his nightmarish visions. Jones, the former member of SAIMR, says he's done it. "We participated in Mozambique to spread the AIDS virus through medical conditions," he said.

At least one other member of SAIMR had apparently expressed concerns about the group's medical programs. Dagmar Feil was a marine biologist recruited by her boyfriend. In 1990, she was murdered in front of her home in Johannesburg. his relatives believe that the murder was related to his work as part of SAIMR's AIDS program.

"My sister came to see me and she said she had to confide in me," her brother Karl Feil told the directors. "She sat down with me and said that she thought they were going to kill her." She said that three or four other members of her team had already been murdered, but when asked what team Dagmar said, "She could not tell me."

"The subject of AIDS research has been touched on several occasions, quite loosely in conversations, I've never put together two and two," Feil said in the film. Instead, Dagmar asked Karl to accompany her to the church, so that she could "do right with God." A few weeks later, she was dead.

Jones says he knows Dagmar Feil and says his death came after a trip to Mozambique, which he describes as a base for the group's medical experiment. "She was recruited to do medical research," he says. "She progressed and became a member of the restricted circle of operations. She went to Mozambique to fulfill her obligations and … we learned that she was going to testify. "

Feil's family spent years trying to find out what had happened to him, but the police showed little interest, his brother said. During this period, the family stated that another member of the SAIMR had handed them papers that we thought were Maxwell's memoirs and his SAIMR story. They then shared them with the filmmakers.

Dagmar Feil's mother has also been to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission several times, said Karl Feil. She asked him to investigate the murder of his daughter as part of a larger conspiracy, but was refused.

Although the commission first revealed the existence of SAIMR in the world, the team was also overworked and had to face false confessions. What the family saw as their best hope of discovering the truth disappeared. "They would not listen," Karl Feil says. "They would not discuss this issue at all."

Andreas Rocksen co-produced and Mads Brügger directed Cold Case Hammarskjöld. He was supported by DocSoc