Other Names: None, but also spelled Protechnic in some sources
Location: in Centurion, a suburb of Pretoria (since 1998)
Subordinate to: originally the South African Defence Force (SADF), now the state armaments corporation ARMSCOR
Size: Unknown
Primary Function: Protechnik Laboratories is a manufacturing and testing facility for CW defensive equipment that used actual toxic substances made at both the CW production company Delta G Scientific and the BW production company Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL) in its tests

Description:
Protechnik was an SADF front company (or parastate company) that manufactured and tested the reliability of various types of CW defensive equipment, including body suits, gas masks, filters, and detection devices. In 1986 Project Officer Wouter Basson and Delta G managing director Philip Mijburgh authorized Dr. Jan Lourens—who then served as a bio-engineering consultant at RRL—to establish such a company under the name Systems Research and Development (SRD), for which funding was provided by the South African Medical Services (SAMS). The following year Lourens transferred the chemical section of SRD to a newly-formed company in another location, Protechnik Laboratories, in order to continue work on his pet Chemical Defence Project. This facility at first cost around 4-5 million rand per year to run, but later these annual operating costs increased to 18-20 million rand. Among Protechnik's shareholders, who shifted over time, were Lourens, Mijburgh's holding company Medchem Consolidated Investments (MCI), Basson's WPW Investments firm, and a Luxembourg-based company called Charburn Enterprises, which was owned by two Belgian businessmen, Charles van Remoortere and Bernard Zimmer. To test its defensive products, Protechnik employed actual CW agents and toxic substances provided by Delta G and RRL rather than simulants. As a result the protective products it manufactured were considered to be the best in the world, so much so that during the 1990-1991 Gulf War all sides desperately sought to acquire them. Rooikat armored cars and G6 self-propelled guns equipped with chemical filtration systems were in fact exported to certain Middle Eastern countries. Protechnik therefore developed into a "full scale chemical defense facility."

There are four noteworthy aspects of Protechnik in the context of Project Coast. First, even after moving to Protechnik from SRD, Lourens continued to interface with the personnel at SRD's mechanical section, the so-called QB Labs, where arcane assassination weapons called "applicators" were being produced. Some portion of Protechnik's budget was apparently being funneled to the QB Labs, since after Van Remoortere and Zimmer purchased the newly-privatized company in 1993 they fired Lourens for embezzling 190,000 rand which remained unaccounted for. Later, they learned that this money had actually been used to finance the production of "applicators." Second, an unspecified CW agent stored at Protechnik may have been used in the alleged 16 January 1992 bombing of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO: Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) troops by an unmanned observer aircraft. Third, Protechnik was supposedly trying to develop a storage system for a binary CW agent, possibly sarin or the trickier VX, which could also be used as a delivery system. Fourth, unnamed persons from Protechnik requested that RRL scientist Mike Odendaal prepare five cigarettes contaminated with anthrax for them.

Protechnik temporarily became a commercial company after it was purchased from MCI by Van Remoortere and Zimmer in 1993, even though its primary client remained the SADF. In June 1994, however, the two Belgians sold the company to ARMSCOR for 960,000 rand—1/3 of which was then forwarded to one of Basson's accounts. Since then, Protechnik has been a full-fledged ARMSCOR subsidiary that, according to its own promotional description, "conducts research and development in the field of protection of personnel against hazardous chemicals (industrial and chemical warfare agents) in hot and humid environments...the synthesis of analytical standards of CW agents and related compounds, the decontamination of hazardous chemicals, and the evaluation/quality control of materials used in the manufacture of protective equipment." In 1998, the company moved to a new facility in the Pretoria suburb of Centurion. One year later it co-hosted the First African Seminar on Analytical Issues relating to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Indeed, Protechnik now plays "a key role in advising both the [South African] Departments of Trade & Industry and Foreign Affairs on technical aspects related to the implementation of the [CWC]."

Key Sources:
"ARMSCOR: List of Companies," ARMSCOR website: <www.armscor.co.za>; Centre for Conflict Resolution, Basson Trial: Weekly Summaries of Court Proceedings, October 1999-April 2002, especially the testimony of Basson, Bruwer, Knobel, Jan Lourens, and "Mr. Q"; Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid's Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2002), pp. 105-8; Paul Fauvet, "Mozambican claims on 1992 chemical attack now appear correct," The Star (17 June 1998); Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), pp. 261-3.; Protechnik website: <www.protechnik.co.za>; "‘SA should be ready' for chemical warfare," Dispatch (14 March 1998): <www.dispatch.co.za>; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Hearings, June-July 1998, especially the testimony of Knobel, Jan Lourens, Neethling, Swanepoel, and Van Remoortere; John Yeld, "SADF bombed Frelimo in chemical weapons test and blamed ANC," The Cape Argus (17 June 1998).

	Updated March 2004