New documentary claims SA mercenaries ‘planned’ spread of HIV

A new documentary premiered this weekend at the Sundance Film Festival, named Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which tells of a South Africa-based mercenary group allegedly trying to intentionally spread HIV in southern Africa.

The documentary depicts a former mercenary accusing a former mercenary group that masterminded coups and violence in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s of spreading the epidemic, The Guardian reports.

The claims are made by Alexander Jones in the documentary – he spent years as an intelligence officer with the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR)

The film also claims that SAIMR leader Keith Maxwell had an obsession with HIV/Aids and reportedly claimed to be a doctor without medical qualifications, while running clinics in poor black areas around Johannesburg, to allegedly carry out sinister experiments.

He wrote about hopes for a plague that would decimate black populations, cementing white rule and bringing back conservative religious mores, according to papers collected by the film-makers.

The Guardian reports that the film makers were investigating SAIMR because it claimed responsibility for the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld, the then United Nations secretary-general.

“What easier way to get a guinea pig than [when] you live in an apartheid system?” Jones says in the film. “Black people have got no rights, they need medical treatment. There’s a white ‘philanthropist’ coming in and saying, ‘You know, I’ll open up these clinics and I’ll treat you.’ And meantime [he is] actually the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

In the documentary, the doctor offered strange treatments, including putting patients through “tubes”, which he claimed allowed him to see inside their bodies.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld will be released in Denmark in February.

(Compiled by Gopolang Chawane)

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