The South African state on Monday sought permission from the Constitutional Court to retry apartheid germ warfare expert Wouter Basson who walked free on several charges including multiple murder three years ago.
In a marathon 30-month trial that cost an estimated 40 million rand (US$6.7 million dollars), Basson was acquitted in April 2002 on 46 charges ranging from murder and fraud to drug-dealing.
"If the allegations are true, it means that he was one of the most serious offenders of crimes committed under apartheid," state lawyer Wim Trengove told the court on Monday.
Basson, 54, a former army brigadier, was head of the apartheid government's chemical and biological warfare program for 12 years when South African troops were fighting black nationalists in neighboring Namibia, Angola and at home.
Bizarre Schemes
During the trial, the court heard of plots to kill prominent black politicians with schemes as bizarre as an umbrella that fired deadly pellets, or lacing their clothes with toxins, as happened with anti-apartheid activist Frank Chikane, who was poisoned by that method on a trip to the US in 1989.
Witnesses testified how the heart surgeon's arsenal included cigarettes and envelope-flaps contaminated with anthrax, bottles of cholera and poisoned beer, whiskey, chocolates and sugar.
The state is now for a third time trying to appeal the acquittal of "Dr Death," who was first arrested in February 1997.
"There are a number of Constitutional imperatives for the prosecution of people like Dr Basson," Trengove told the court.
"The Constitution requires that this government should not walk away from these allegations until they have been properly adjudicated," Trengove said, according to the SAPA news agency.
The state lost an appeal bid in the Pretoria High Court and again in the Supreme Court of Appeal in June 2003. It has now turned to the highest court in the country, the Constitutional Court, to appeal against the 2003 decision it lost.
If the state wins its latest attempt, it would be able to retry Basson, who returned to practicing medicine after his acquittal.
Originally indicted on 67 charges in March 1999, Basson's defense early into his trial managed to quash several counts related to alleged conspiracies to murder opponents of the apartheid government in London, Namibia, Mozambique and Swaziland.
The charges were dropped because the alleged conspiracies happened outside South Africa.
It included a charge that Basson supplied knockout drugs to about 200 South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) guerrillas in Namibia before dumping them from a plane into the ocean.
Basson was also allegedly involved in the poisoning of the water supply of a SWAPO refugee camp with cholera bacteria in 1989.
Mishandled Case
The state on Monday partly based its argument on the fact that Pretoria High Court Judge Willie Hartzenberg, who began his career on the bench in apartheid days, refused to recuse himself from the case when the state accused him of bias.
It also argued that several charges, including the one related to the SWAPO deaths, should not have been dropped because Namibia was at the time of the alleged crimes a territory administered as part of South Africa.
The hearing is expected to continue until next Monday.
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