'I was totally bloody shocked', says Karabus

"We are keeping you because you are a murderer," snapped a customs official, inspecting Cyril Karabus's passport during the South African doctor's fateful stopover in Dubai in August last year.

With those words, a nine-month ordeal of confusion, anger and despair began.

"I was totally bloody shocked," recalled the professor yesterday in an exclusive interview at his home in Kenilworth, Cape Town.

As he was arrested, the renowned oncologist looked on as his helpless family - wife Jenifer, daughter Sarah, her husband Gavin and Karabus's two grandchildren, Noah and Ella - were ushered through customs to catch a connecting flight home.

His nightmare ended only on Friday - and were it not for the desperate lobbying of many South Africans, it might have lasted for years.

Deputy Minister of International Relations Marius Fransman and businessman Dr Iqbal Survé have emerged as the dealmakers who sped up Karabus's release.

The two were involved in intense lobbying of the Abu Dhabi royal family and, in particular, the emirate's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed.

Hours after Karabus's flight landed at Cape Town International Airport, an envoy of the crown prince called Fransman to ask whether the doctor had arrived safely.

Looking relaxed in a pin-striped blue shirt and blue trousers, Karabus recalled his first night in custody, sleeping on a steel bench in a room adjoining a holding cell at the airport.

"I was totally bewildered," he said. "I did not know why I was being held."

He made his first entry in a poignant diary of his ordeal, initially written on scraps of paper. It reads: "Arrive Dubai. Get visas. Passport examined - charge murder. Locked in 9m² room, Dubai airport. Under arrest, yes."

He was then transferred to two different prisons for the following two nights and then to the Al Wathbah prison, where he spent two months.

There he shared a medical ward with two brothers accused of murder and a foreign psychiatrist held for dishing out too many anti-depressants.

Another diary entry reads: "Hot as hell, waiting out in the sun with shackles on wrists and ankles. Sitting in a 15m² waiting room with 40 other prisoners. No word yet."

The emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town was on trial in the UAE for the death of a cancer patient.

Karabus, who has a pacemaker and a stent in a coronary artery, was arrested en route from Toronto, Canada, where he had attended his son Matthew's wedding.

He had no idea that he had been charged in the UAE, let alone tried and convicted in absentia, for the death of a patient in October 2002.

Sarah Abdulla, 3, died while Karabus was working as a locum at the Sheikh Khalifa Medical Centre. She had been suffering from acute myeloid leukaemia.

Karabus was livid with Emirates, the airline he travelled on. When checking in at Toronto, he said, a staff member told him that there was a "security alert" against his name.

But after checking with a superior, she came back and told him he was "free" to board the aeroplane.

The airline's head office ignored requests for comment.

Asked whether it had failed in its duty to Karabus as a fare-paying passenger, Emirates South Africa also refused to comment, saying that it was a "legal matter" that had nothing to do with the airline.

Karabus said that if the airline had warned him of the significance of the security alert or that he faced arrest, he would not have boarded the aircraft.

With the drama behind him, he laughed yesterday as he recalled how he helped some prisoners with minor ailments.

But his biggest fear at the time was not being able to communicate with his wife because he was denied access to a telephone while in custody.

He passed his time by reading a book on how babies learn to talk as well as English newspapers. During his court appearances while in prison, his wrists and ankles were always shackled.

Eventually, on October 11 last year, he was released on bail, but he left the prison only on October 14 because it had taken time for the R240000 bail paid by his family to clear.

For the next seven months, he lived in an apartment in Abu Dhabi with Dr Elwin Buchel, the former head of gastroenterology at the University of Pretoria.

His daily routine was "very boring", he said.

"Apart from the mosque, there was nothing exciting to see in Abu Dhabi. I felt totally bored and just wanted to get the hell out of that place."

He often drank a whisky after a court appearance to ease the boredom and tension.

"I have been in limbo for nine months not knowing what was going on. It's a long time - the gestation of a baby. You don't know what's happening in court," he wrote in his diary.

Other diary entries include his description of inmates while he was incarcerated.

He describes one of them, Yusuf, as a diabetic, "silent, with stick, loves sitting in the sun", and another as a "huge, silent guy who was a diabetic and con artist".

In another entry, he wrote: "Six months here. Nothing to do today. Hip bit sore."

Catching a glimpse of Table Mountain from the air as the aeroplane prepared to land in Cape Town was one of the "happiest moments" for him.

He cannot recollect his first words to Jenifer as he arrived at the airport, saying that he was "obviously happy" and overjoyed to see his three-month-old grandson, Gabriel, who was born while he was in the UAE.

Noah, 6, and Ella, 3, coloured in the words "I love you, grandpa", which filled his eyes with tears.

Jenifer said that she was "over the moon" to have her husband back.

How freedom was won

IF you need a big favour in Abu Dhabi, it's best to talk to the crown prince. In their lobbying campaign on behalf of Cyril Karabus, Deputy Minister of International Relations Marius Fransman and businessman Dr Iqbal Survé appealed, via intermediaries, to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed for help. And the 51-year-old heir to the throne sped up a process that might otherwise have taken years.

Fransman and Survé revealed details of their secret negotiations with the crown prince about the ailing doctor's release following his release on Friday.

Karabus's release hinged on confirmation of a medical review committee that he had given the patient a blood transfusion. Medical records showed Karabus had done so as her platelet count rose.

Survé, who studied medicine under Karabus, said a dinner that he attended with a high-ranking member of the royal family had "hastened the decision by the legal system" to get the medical committee to examine the records of the patient.

"A day after the dinner, the medical committee issued a statement saying that Dr Karabus had been cleared ... We identified the royal family as a critical factor and then raised the human factor with them, which was that Karabus was 78 years old, his health was bad and he had just got a new grandson," said Fransman.

He said Survé had worked through linkages with the royal family while he "did things from the government's side".