A new documentary has exposed how a South Africa-based mercenary group, the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), tried to intentionally spread AIDS in southern Africa countries of Mozambique and South Africa during the apartheid era in the 1980s and 1990s.

Alexander Jones a former member of the sinister group who was party to the clandestine agenda, made the claims while speaking to makers of the documentary ‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’, which premiered in January at the Sundance film festival in United States.

The group was headed by Keith Maxwell, a self-declared “commodore” of SAIMR.

Jones said he spent years as an intelligence officer with SAIMR, three decades ago, when it was masterminding coups and other violence across Africa.

The ex-member said the group “spread the virus” at the behest of its eccentric leader Keith Maxwell, who wanted a white majority country where “the excesses of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have no place in the post-Aids world”.

He said Maxwell, who had few, if any medical qualifications, set himself up as a doctor treating poor, black South Africans.

“He ran clinics in poor, mostly black areas around Johannesburg while claiming to be a doctor. That gave him the opportunity for sinister experimentation.

“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,” Jones said in the film.

Jones said SAIMR also operated outside South Africa, telling the documentary:

“We were involved in Mozambique, spreading the Aids virus through medical conditions.”

According to the documentary directed by Danish filmmaker, Mads Brügger, members of the community testified to the “strange treatments” and “false injections” offered by the doctor, whose name remains bolted on his former place of practice in the city of Putfontein in the province of Gauteng, South Africa.

 

 

One local shopkeeper said the so-called doctor had given “false injections”.

According to papers collected by the film-makers Maxwell wrote about a plague he hoped would decimate black populations, cement white rule, and bring back conservative religious mores. Other letters revealed Maxwell’s feverish aspirations to isolate the HIV virus and propagate it against Black Africans.

The film also revealed the SAIMR group was riddled with allegations and mysterious murders of members who had allegedly threatened to testify.

SAIMR has also been accused of working with British intelligence and the American CIA to assassinate UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, whose plane exploded just before landing in Zambia in 1961, as he tried to broker a peace between the newly independent Congo and the breakaway province of Katanga.