2009/05/01
IN MAY 1972, Fouad (Flash Fred) Kamil’s desire for vengeance against the late mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer and his Anglo American and De Beers diamond group over diamonds, drove him to become the first hijacker of a South African Airways plane.
Kamil is still alive. He is 83 years old, lives in Brazil and keeps himself busy with painting. But he still harbours the same grudge against the mighty Anglo group.
Armed with a few sticks of dynamite, the Lebanese-born Kamil, at the time the most notorious figure in the shadowy underworld of illicit diamond smuggling, and his cohort Abou Yaghi, forced SAA’s Captain Blake Flemington to land the Letaba, a Boeing 727 en route from the then-Rhodesia to Johannesburg, in Malawi.
Kamil believed that Anglo American owed him money for diamonds which he had recovered on its behalf.
His ultimatum to Flemington was for him to arrange that the Anglo chairperson meet with them at Chileka Airport in Blantyre. If not, they would blow up Anglo’s headquarters in 44 Main Street, Johannesburg and kidnap Oppenheimer’s daughter, Mary, who had been married to former Scottish rugby international Gordon Waddell. Waddell joined the Anglo group after his marriage to Mary.
During a tense stand-off during the night – Malawian troops had deflated the aircraft’s wheels – the majority of the passengers escaped with the help of Flemington.
After Flemington had also left the aircraft, and with troops converging on the grounded plane, Kamil and Yaghi realised the game was up. After a short burst of heavy machine gun fire the drama ended. Kamil and Yaghi surrendered.
“Those thieves in the air, those gangsters, those fools will be left to rot and cool off in jail ....” These were the words of Malawi’s late president, Hastings Banda, after the surrender.
Described on the inside cover of his book, The Diamond Underworld, as a bandit, mercenary, hijacker, blackmailer, the best diamond agent the world has ever seen, Kamil – and Yaghi – spent a few months in jail before being released.
Kamil described their meeting with Banda after leaving prison, during which Banda told them they were welcome to stay in Malawi or return whenever they wanted to.
Later Kamil’s wife, Melonie, and his son, Riad, joined them from Johannesburg. They returned to Johannesburg while Kamil flew to Madrid, where he stayed for a number of years.
It was during that time when Kamil first contacted me. I was news editor of Rapport and received a call from Spain. “It’s Fred Kamil,” he said.
Kamil called me because he wanted the name of a South African attorney to represent him against Oppenheimer and the Anglo group. He still had not forgotten about the money which he said was owed to him.
I put him in contact with an attorney friend, Johan Rhoodie, who travelled to Madrid at Kamil’s expense to consult with the convicted hijacker. Kamil and I had numerous telephone conversations and in December 1980 he sent me a signed copy of his book.
Meanwhile, Oppenheimer was named in the South African Parliament as the key object of Kamil’s monumental ransom demand.
Oppenheimer told SAA officials that he knew nothing about the “grudge” motive behind the hijacking.
The relationship between Kamil and Anglo started in 1965 when, according to his book, he was recruited by the diamond giant to recover missing diamonds for it – for a third of their value.
Heading a hand-picked 30- man team and working in cooperation with the then-police’s diamond branch and Anglo’s head of security, Colonel George Visser, Kamil recovered a small fortune in missing diamonds.
Kamil said he knew from the start that it would be difficult to serve two masters; the diamond branch and Anglo American.
After about two years his South African operation came to an end, but it was the start of an acrimonious relationship with Anglo. There were disputes over previous agreements that had to be settled.
Kamil and his wife left for London where he made a call to Visser. He told Visser that he intended to claim for his part in recovering missing diamonds during an earlier operation.
In a taped conversation Visser told him: “It’s true you were working on the operation. But someone beat you to it and a group has already claimed a third of the value ....”
Following that conversation, Kamil wrote a number of letters to Anglo repeating his claim. He was unsuccessful and later, in a hotel room in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe) he planned his revenge. “The hijacking was to take place the following day. Mr Gordon Waddell, ex-son-in- law of Harry Oppenheimer, was flying to Johannesburg,” he writes in The Diamond Underworld. The plan was to hijack the SAA plane, hoping that Waddell’s presence on board would bring Oppenheimer to negotiate a settlement. Once that was done the hostages would be released, except for Oppenheimer, who would be held for a second stage of the operation: a demand for the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners held on Robben Island.
The plan backfired. Waddell was not on the Boeing and Oppenheimer never responded. Instead, Kamil and Yaghi landed in a hot Malawian jail.
Kamil maintained that the diamonds recovered during Operation Ovambo were valued at R1256042, instead of R180 000, as Visser and Anglo director Tony Wilson claimed. It showed that Anglo had defrauded him of R358680.66, he claimed.
But, he says, his South African lawyer, Abe Swersky, whom he said was a large shareholder in Anglo American and a friend of the Oppenheimer family, declared: “Your case is prescribed and rendered unenforceable by law. Anglo American refuses to settle. I am sorry, there is nothing further I can do for you.”
Swersky advised him to forget Anglo American and open a new page in life.
“I replied venomously: ‘I intend to hunt down Harry Oppenheimer (and) his directors’.”
Read the second part of Kamil’s story tomorrow in Daily Life - By EDDIE BOTHA
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