The scientist dubbed "Doctor Death" by South African media played for time yesterday as the Truth Commission inquired into his past at the head of the apartheid regime's chemical weapons programme.
Dr Wouter Basson used every legal trick in the book to parry the questions of the human rights violations section of the Commission, which must finish its work tomorrow. Dr Basson won himself 24 hours more silence, but was ordered to reappear today and was warned that he would finally be forced to give evidence.
"The panel reluctantly . . . grants a postponement to tomorrow [Thursday] at nine o'clock in this room," said Mr Dumisa Ntsebeza, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission panel that has been hearing evidence on the chemical weapons programme for the past two months. "We will . . . proceed tomorrow whether or not Dr Wouter Basson has found a legal representative," he added.
During the hearings Dr Basson has emerged as the key figure running an ultra-secret programme that made undetectable poisons to kill apartheid's enemies, plotted to make black people infertile and manufactured illegal drugs on a vast scale.
Dr Basson has argued through a legal team paid for by the South African National Defence Force that anything he may say could prejudice the criminal trial he faces next month on charges ranging from conspiracy to murder, to manufacture and possession of one tonne each of ecstasy and mandrax, and fraud.
Dr Basson, who travelled the world secretly in the 1980s to collect know-how and material for the programme, has also warned that some of what he has to say is so sensitive that even now it could embarrass foreign governments.
It was revealed during the hearings that the US and Britain both made formal approaches in 1994 to the former National Party apartheid government to keep the programme secret from the African National Congress.