Is This World a Little Too Small?
Saturday, August 21, 2004
I've been reading the coverage of the N4610 trial, waiting for something interesting to happen. The defense has concluded its arguments; the mercenaries will not be extradited to Equatorial Guinea.
But here's an interesting bit: Mercenary accused 'guarded' Haiti's Aristide:
Harare - One of the 70 alleged South African mercenaries on trial in Zimbabwe was guarding deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide days before he was taken into custody.
Raymond Stanley Archer told a makeshift court in Zimbabwe's maximum security jail on Thursday that he was having lunch with his ex-wife in Johannesburg when he got a phone call offering him a job to guard a mine.
He said he had arrived back in South Africa three days earlier after an assignment as a bodyguard to Aristide - who has since been granted temporary asylum in South Africa - when a man whom he identified as James Kershaw contacted him on his cellphone.
"He said if I could get to the airport within an hour, I could have the job. I met the rest of the accused and flew out. I had met about 10 of them before.
"As far as I was concerned, we stopped in Harare to refuel."
Now, I know it's a Small World After All, but wasn't a San Francisco-based company provinding Aristide's security? Wasn't it the Steele Foundation? Did Raymond Stanley Archerwork for Steele? How peculiar.
MEANWHILE, Derek Davids (aka Johnathan Constable), chief executive of International Intelligence Risk Management, has been released by South African police following a raid of his company's offices for suspected mercenary activity.