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Fear in the Free State
| Date: |
05 April 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Susan Purèn
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| Presenter: |
Devi Sankaree Govender
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
In May last year we told you the story of the Pakistani mafia operating in the eastern Free State; ruthless men who kidnapped fellow Pakistani immigrants in South Africa and across the border in Lesotho.
Leon Rossouw, a Bloemfontein consulting detective, solved the murder of one of the victims by analyzing their cellphone records.
Leon's thorough detective work led to the discovery of Zia Khan's body in a shallow grave on a property in Bloemfontein.
The suspects, in the meantime, had split up and were on the run, but Leon and the police soon traced them.
These six [on screen] were arrested and charged with kidnapping, extortion and murder in the Zia Khan case. They are still in custody.
One of them was also a suspect in another case involving missing Pakistanis.
They had disappeared in 2007 and had last been seen in the border town of Clocolan.
With this information Leon headed for Clocolan where he located the house where the six suspects had stayed before their arrest.
Here he found more evidence including documents and personal papers that positively linked the suspects to the missing four.
Devi Sankaree Govender (Carte Blanche presenter): "Problem was there were no bodies. The six suspects in custody refused to talk and the case went cold€¦ until November last year."
That's when Leon received information that two more suspects, who were still on the run, had been seen in the Nelspruit area.
He reacted quickly and had their photographs placed in a local newspaper.
Leon Rossow (Consulting detective): "Tuesday morning the newspaper hit the streets and within an hour a local detective, a superintendent from Barberton, phoned me and said, Well, I've got good news for you - I've just arrested the one.'"
The police then received new information, which led them back to the suspect's house in Clocolan.
And within 24 hours the bodies of the four missing Pakistanis were found in a shallow grave in the back yard of the house next door.
Leon: "It was a big moment for me - to end my year like that. And I think for any investigating officer, to solve a case where four people were buried on top of each other. It doesn't happen every day."
This is all that's left of the area where the bodies were found. But this exact spot had been pointed out six months prior to the excavation as the burial place of at least one of the Pakistani men. It was pointed out by somebody who had nothing to do with the case, but who's a well-known face on Carte Blanche.
Danie Krugel, a former police colonel, is the man who has invented a device which he claims can trace people.
To accomplish this, he only needs a DNA sample from a person, like a strand of hair or a drop of body fluid.
Danie has always claimed that his invention is based on science.
[Carte Blanche December 2006] Danie Krugel (Former police colonel): "This is science - science, science, science."
Danie's many successes have been widely documented, but best known is his controversial claim in 2007 of the discovery of some remains of the missing girls in the Gert van Rooyen case.
Human bones were found, but their DNA could not be matched with that of the mothers of the missing girls because the bone's DNA was too degraded.
So, in the end we were unable to establish whether the female remains found were indeed those of two of the missing girls.
In the Clocolan case Danie worked with a hair sample of only one of the missing men.
Danie: "I screened an area of Clocolan in Andries Pretorius street - I've got a positive signal at the pink house and positive signals at the back of the house, close to a chicken run."
The chicken run was in fact on a neighbouring property.
Danie pegged the area and informed the police of his findings.
These pictures show that the chicken pen was right at the centre of the marked area.
Forensic specialists and police dogs were then called to the scene.
Danie: "They had dogs there, they had ground-penetrating rover there, and they had forensic teams there, and they said the bodies were not there."
Ficksburg journalist, Tjaart van Eeden, takes up the story.
Tjaart van Eeden (Journalist - Fickburg Times): "And that is what was so strange - dogs were in the chicken dig, and they were digging there with a shovel. And they said there was nothing. If the dogs didn't smell it, and they couldn't find it with their equipment, then it was just assumed that nothing was there."
Danie, however, was so sure of his findings that he offered to privately fund an excavation of the area.
The offer was accepted.
With Danie's money the police began excavating. They started here and moved down that way. As they were excavating they threw soil on this side of the fence. What they didn't realise was that the soil was now sitting right on top of the graves of the four men which was right here in the centre of Danie's demarcation.
They missed the bodies with 30 centimeters.
Then, six months after the failed excavation, Leon placed the pictures in the newspaper, police made the arrest and obtained new information which led them to the grave in the chicken run, just where Danie had said it would be.
Danie refuses to reveal the theory behind his invention. All he is prepared to say is that it works with quantum entanglement. This theory suggests that subatomic particles, which are randomly far apart, influence each other. Einstein and two fellow scientists were the first to experiment with quantum entanglement.
Professor Heleen Coetzee (Scientist): "They showed a pair of atoms that were separated from one another. Whatever they did to the one, the other one showed the same reaction. So it came down to them saying there was some or other invisible force connecting these two atoms."
But could it really be that Danie's machine is doing this?
Quantum Physics tells us it can. You're talking of a field that's outside space and time. In that dimension there is no distance.
Professor Heleen Coetzee is the former head of Histology at the University of Pretoria's medical Faculty. She is the co-author of several books and articles and has lectured for Quantum Alliance South Africa. She runs a practice where she treats patients with the scientific consciousness interface operation system or SCIO. It is a sophisticated biofeedback device approved by the American Food and Drug Association.
Heleen: "The hair that he uses is like a DNA fingerprint, and it has a frequency. And he has been able to capture that frequency, identify that frequency and amplify that frequency. If he identifies the frequency, then he has a direct connection to the other. It is like he searches - like you would search a radio station: phase-locking, or connecting to it."
Dr David Klatzow is a medical bio-chemist with 25 years of experience as a forensic scientist. He's well known for his 20-year long investigation into the Helderberg plane crash. He was also the first to claim that Brett Kebble's death was assisted suicide.
Devi: "What is your take on Danie Kugel's invention?"
Dr David Klatzow (Forensic scientist): "Well, it's a difficult one. First of all I think you need to say that Danie believes without a doubt, firmly, in what he is telling you. There is no question in my mind that this is not a cheap fraud on Danie's part. Whether he is correct or not is very difficult to say. And I think you need to say from the outset that scientists who tell you that something is absolutely impossible are almost always wrong. Whereas scientist's who tell you something is possible, are often right."
But, like many others, David has doubts about Danie's invention.
Dr Klatzow: "There is no evidence at the moment that he is actually measuring quantum entanglement, which is a real phenomenon. There are many, many people who are right in the thick of quantum physics and for a man to come out of a police background and with no quantum physics and no scientific training to make this world-shattering discovery is, to say the least, very unlikely."
Heleen: "He's no electrical engineer or anything, but he struggled through the principles and the basics and he got the device to work. And it works and it's repeatable. So why did he need a degree for that?"
David insists that proper scientific protocol needs to be set up to test Danie's machine. He says that information in the public domain could have played a role in Danie's successes.
Dr Klatzow: "There is observer bias. There are people who have agenda's on this - one way or the other. The police have one agenda, the police have another agenda. It may be a pure agenda, and I am not suggesting for one moment that his agenda is anything but. And there are too many loose ends in the tests that have been done to date to make them scientific."
Heleen: "I think he's done enough to show that this thing works. I know that there are certain ways of doing research, where if you have done enough of the same thing, and you get the same results, statistically it is provable that this thing is right."
Danie has never allowed his machine to be photographed or filmed.
Dr Klatzow: "The scientists are skeptical about somebody who comes with something and says, I wish you to believe this on faith, believe it because I tell you.' That's not how science works."
Devi: "Is this device unique?"
Heleen: "What he has designed, using the techniques that he has employed in this device - yes, because it is very specific for what he's using it."
When you search for Danie Krugel on the Internet there are literally thousands of references. The most mentioned is his private search in Portugal for Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old British girl that went missing in Praia da Luz two years ago.
The case still haunts him, more so after the Clocolan findings.
In July 2007 Carte Blanche accompanied Danie to the Algarve. We arrived in the middle of the night and Danie immediately got a signal using a sample of Madeleine's hair. It pointed to an area east of the village and close to the beach.
The next day he refined the search area to this desolated stretch of land about 700 meters from where the McCanns had stayed.
The police were informed and a detailed report given to the relevant parties.
But surprisingly neither the McCanns nor the police followed up and searched the area. This is despite the fact that they had invited Danie to assist.
Madeleine McCann has never been found.
Danie: "Go back, you will find her there. I'm telling you Devi, there's no doubt in my mind."
So are we sitting on the brink of what's probably one of the greatest inventions of this century? We'll only know once Danie reveals the secret behind his machine. Until then he'll be at the centre of controversy.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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