MASTERS BEHIND NUKE MURDERS

THE REPORT in the Saturday Star “Hit on engineer like something out of Hollywood” (November 8) warrants a response. Some time ago, according to media reports, a wellknown senior advocate received a dodgy jab while leaving the North Gauteng High Court. It has been claimed that Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat was killed by nuclear assassins using polonium-210. This is developing into a John le Carré thriller.

There was a conspiracy to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro with untraceable poisons. In this case, the poison was botulinum toxin.

Ukraine’s nationalist leader, Viktor Yuschenko, Chechen independence fighter Khattab and Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko were all victims of untraceable poisons. Pope John Paul I is rumoured to have been killed by the Mafia, using untraceable poison.

A microgram of PO-120, which is larger than a speck of dust, can deliver a fatal dose of radiation. It is slowly excreted, it has a biological half life of around a month, and this ensures its alpha particles wreak havoc once inside the body.

Polonium-210 is highly dangerous to life, if it is taken into the body by breathing it, drinking or eating, or if it gets into a wound.

As little as a single gram of polonium-210 generates 140 Watts. It is also used as a heat source for satellite power supplies. Being rare, polonium-210 is expensive. This is not a tool chosen by amateurs. These people have serious resources behind them.

Farouk Araie

TOM Mhlanga’s heartfelt plea to South Africa to get over its racist/racism hangover from more than three centuries of racism (November 8) has a huge gap down the middle – why no finger-pointing at the black on black or black on non-black racism manifested in yesteryear’s blatantly provocative antiIndian songs by Bongani Ngema (with their 1949-style anti-Indian, Zulu pogroms) and now from a medical student – also from KwaZuluNatal – in the same vein as the still- extant “kill the boer” mantra.

Or does Mr Mhlanga subscribe to the view that reverse racism (with non-blacks on the receiving end) is kosher and is a form of payback to white- and brown-skinned South Africans for their racism vis-à-vis their black fellow citizens?

Mahee Musa Tshabalala

I CLEARLY don’t move in the same elitist circles as “wordsmith” Paul Maree does, but my entire family and most of my colleagues default to the name Joburg, and I cannot recall when last I heard anybody use the word Johannesburg. Probably around the time I heard somebody talk about Port Elizabeth, rather than the simpler but equally accurate PE. That said, I think the word we’re looking for is “pedantic”.

Mitch Launspach

PLEASE tell me that the article “Impose a minimum wage and see jobs vanish” (November 8) was a late April Fool’s joke?

Cat Hanson