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GUESSWHOâS BEENSPOTTED IN
TOWN?
GIVE MY KIDNEY BACK,HUSBAND TOLD â PAGE 3
OUT OFAFRICA
FILMFEST
UNITED STILLTHE TEAM TOBEAT â TERRY
â PAGE 3 â THE GOOD WEEKEND â PAGES 23 & 25
On the face of it⊠Frankly fantastic
Poison scare at V&A Joburgâstough guysaim to makeCape saferHENRIETTE GELDENHUYS
A GAUTENG security firm known
for its tough approach to crime-solv-
ing and headed by two former top
cops has launched its first project in
the Western Cape â safeguarding
Stellenbosch.
The company intends to extend
its operations to False Bay suburbs
as well as
Cape Town
itself.
The com-
pany is head-
ed by private
investigators
Piet Byleveld
and Bushy
Engelbrecht.
CSS Tacti-
calâs crews,
armed with
s e m i - a u t o -
matic rifles,
patrol 14 of
J o b u r g â s
northern sub-
urbs in large
black 4x4s.
Now they have
launched their
first operation
in the Western
Cape in cen-
tral Stellen-
bosch, next to
the Eerste
River and
opposite the Coetzenburg sports
grounds, contracted by local guest-
houses.
Engelbrecht, a former police
major general, said the company
intended replicating its Joburg oper-
ation in the Western Cape by deploy-
ing teams in Stellenbosch and
expanding to Somerset West, the
Strand, Gordonâs Bay and Cape
Town.
The unconventional security
firm gets to know the owners, ten-
ants, domestic workers and garden-
ers in a specific area and questions
strangers.
It specialises in stopping crime
before it happens and holds the only
local licence for a sophisticated com-
puter package, iSentry, which uses
cameras to measure the size, shape,
speed and direction of the motion of
objects at a clientâs home, and any-
thing thatâs unusual.
âThe system detected robbers To page 3
RIDING HIGH: Cape Townâs Frank Solomon rides a big wave near Pico Alto in Peru â the second stop of the 2011 Big Wave World Tour. Hewon his semi-final heat but did not make it to the finals that took place on Thursday. The competition was won by American Peter Mel.
PICTURE: ENRIQUE CUNEO
PARTNERS: PietByleveld, above,and BushyEngelbrecht.
SHEREE BEGA
CAPE TOWNâS top tourist destina-
tion, the V&A Waterfront, has been
accused of poisoning patrons, includ-
ing a six-year-old child, after it allow-
ed a deadly, banned pesticide to be
sprayed around a popular restaurant
and its public spaces this week.
The Waterfront management has
confirmed that the spray was used,
but said it did not know it had been
banned. Now several customers have
spoken of being caught in the spray
drift of the pesticide and how they
suffered severe headaches and nausea
within minutes of being exposed to it.
On Monday, the V&Aâs mainte-
nance team sprayed Pyrinex 480 EC, a
highly hazardous pesticide, around
plant boxes, flower beds, pavements
and a parking lot.
The active ingredient is chlorpyri-
fos, a deadly organophosphate nerve
toxin, developed during World War II
âto kill peopleâ, according to Jurgen
Schirmacher, the chairman of the
Tatib Foundation, which campaigns
for the safe use of pesticides.
The government banned chlor-
pyrifos in domestic and garden pesti-
cides in May last year. It is allowed in
agricultural pesticides.
A Camps Bay businessman, who
did not want to be identified, said he
had taken his six-year-old son for
breakfast.
âWe were sitting behind a pillar
when all a sudden there was this
unbelievable smell in the air.
âI kept turning around and trying
to work out where it was coming
from. There were another two or
three tables around us.
âMy son told me, âDad thereâs a guy
standing with a mask behind the pil-
lar.â He must have been 2m behind us.
I got up and chased the guy away.
âFor me the fact that the guy was
standing there spraying this stuff
with a mask on, so close to people who
did not know what he was spraying,
made me angry. He moved off and
continued spraying further down.
âWhen we got home, my childâs
nose started bleeding. Then it bled
again a few hours later. Iâm a little
concerned for my son â he seems fine,
but I donât know the degree of damage
done to him, or to the people sitting
around me.â
A Durbanville housewife, who also
did not want to be named, said she
had been ill in bed since the incident.
âI feel terrible. When I came out of
the dentistâs office, I caught the guy in
the act. He was spraying the pesticide
from a knapsack all over the Mugg &
Bean. When I inhaled the spray, I
immediately got a very bad
headache.â
Moments later, she began vomit-
ing. âHow can they spray this stuff
when people are sitting eating lunch
outside and where people are walk-
ing? Children are playing in front of
the shop fronts.â
Her husband, who was in a busi-
ness meeting at the Mugg & Bean, was
now complaining of muscle aches,
neck and back spasms and headaches
while her daughter, who drove her to
the dentist, âfeels out of her bodyâ.
The housewife said: âI spent my
whole birthday in bed. I felt like I was
dying⊠The Waterfront is not a farm.
That is an agricultural concentrate
that is so poisonous it is only allowed
to be used by farmers.
Yesterday the V&A issued a state-
ment confirming that the pesticide
had been sprayed, but added it had
only now been made aware that a
banned pesticide had been âinadver-
tently sprayed on the premisesâ.
It claimed that it was old stock and
had had the product since 2009, before
it was banned: âWe were not aware of
the fact that the substance was subse-
quently banned.â
But a supplier has confirmed that
the numbers on a paper sticker on the
container used at the Waterfront indi-
cated that the product was made in
June 2011.
âTherefore itâs impossible they pur-
chased it in September 2009,â said
Schirmacher. âIt has always been a
highly toxic product and only for use in
agriculture, far away from the public.â
Symptoms of poisoning include
headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomit-
ing, diarrhoea, convulsions, muscle
spasms that can lead to muscle paral-
ysis, and in an extreme cases, death
by suffocation. Early or pre-natal ex-
posure is linked to childhood autism
and attention deficit disorder.
Schirmacher said: âEven pest con-
trol operators are not allowed to use
the product as it is highly toxicâŠ
They have thus broken the law.
âThere are going to be serious
health problems, further down the
line, for those who were sprayed. The
research done on the effects of chlor-
pyrifos clearly proves that it a highly
hazardous poison, and that it is very
dangerous for young children.â
He said his foundation had discov-
ered that V&A employees âwere often
seeing spraying the planter boxes,
flower beds and public areasâ.
But the V&A said it was reviewing
its processes to ensure âthat some-
thing like thisâ did not happen again.
Patrons fall sick as Waterfront claims it didnât know pesticide is illegal
World chaos a touch of the sunLONDON: Rollercoaster financial
markets and the worst riots Britain
has seen in decades have made it
quite a week for a time of year that is
usually so dead the newspapers are
filled with âsilly seasonâ tales of
amusing pet antics.
Everyone is pointing fingers â at
blundering politicians, hooded thugs,
disaffected youths, bumbling police
and greedy bankers â but could the
cause for all the madness really be the
star at the centre of our solar system?
The sun has been throwing bursts
of highly charged particles into space
in a phenomenon known as coronal
mass ejections or CMEs. Three large
CMEs prompted US government sci-
entists to warn of solar storms.
âEarthâs magnetic field is still
reverberating from a CME strike on
August 5 that sparked one of the
strongest geomagnetic storms in
yearsâ, website SpaceWeather said.
Some academics have claimed that
such geomagnetic storms can affect
humans, altering moods and leading
people into negative behaviour
through effects on their biochemistry.
It could of course be mere coinci-
dence that this has been a roller-
coaster week on the markets, and
that Britain was rocked by a wave of
ferocious rioting and looting.
But market watchers may take
comfort from the fact that the space
weather forecast yesterday went quiet
again. â Reuters
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