Blood Money
The Cyril Karabus Story
By Suzanne BellingJacana Media (Pty) Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Suzanne Belling
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4314-1028-6
Contents
1. 'Murderer!',
2. The jail in the desert,
3. Bid for blood money,
4. A stoic in shackles,
5. Bail granted!,
6. 'Free the Prof.',
7. Nemesis of justice,
8. Waking to a nightmare,
9. Strange bedfellows,
10. Wheels within wheels,
11. In the public domain,
12. Hyperbole and the hypothetical,
13. 'Bring him home',
14. The doctors' diagnosis,
15. Cyril's 'gynae',
16. Viva, Karabus, viva!,
17. Survivors,
18. Cat in the flat,
19. Kafkaesque court,
20. Justice delayed is justice denied,
21. Foreign affairs,
22. Knight in shining armour,
23. Cape doctor,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
CHAPTER 1'Murderer!'
'Murderer, murderer!' shrieked a solitary man running diagonally across the vast, empty concourse at Dubai airport.
World-renowned South African paediatric oncologist Professor Cyril Karabus, then 77, was stopped in his tracks – literally and figuratively. The man, as if participating in an Olympic race, made straight for the doctor. It was 6.30 pm on Saturday, 18 August 2012, and Cyril and his wife, Jenifer (known as Jen), were about the only disembarking passengers left going through passport control in the modern mausoleum.
Eyeballing Cyril, the man raised his voice, shattering the prevailing stillness, and boomed, 'You are a murderer! You are under arrest. Come with me ...'
'Pardon me, there must be a case of mistaken identity.' The professor managed to retain his dignity and his softly spoken demeanour.
'You are Cyril Karabus, the doctor?' asked the man, taking a cursory look at Cyril's passport. 'You are wanted by Interpol.'
'But I didn't murder anyone. I have never committed a crime in my life,' Cyril managed to splutter, as he was led away.
Jen was having none of it. Fearing nobody and never short of words, she demanded, 'Who are you?'
'I am police,' the man deigned to reply in broken English. As he was wearing a lounge suit there was nothing to indicate that he had any official status.
'What is your name?' she persisted.
'I am police,' was all he offered brusquely. He then confiscated all Cyril's belongings and the couple's luggage, permitting his captive only a small brown bag containing a few personal belongings, including a toothbrush.
'It was totally surreal,' Jen told her family afterwards. But she had the presence of mind to slip her husband a credit card in case he needed money. Not in her wildest dreams did she anticipate how much money he would need.
The airport ambush took on a Kafkaesque quality, which continued throughout the nine months of Cyril's incarceration in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
A couple of hours after Cyril was accosted by the mysterious 'policeman', he was put in a nine-square-metre airless room – the holding cell at the airport. Jen was led into what she calls 'a pit in a passage'. She was left alone, for hours on end, with nothing to do but watch a group of Arabs through the doorway drinking coffee.
After what seemed to her to be an eternity, the same 'policeman' put her into a kind of shuttle that resembled a golf cart and sent her to the hotel where she and Cyril had reservations.
Unbeknown to her, after midnight Cyril was bundled into a police van. There was no bed for the elderly, respected professor who suffered from angina, had a stent in one o
