ILLICIT DIAMOND BUYING

Shannon News, 8 June 1926, Page 2

ILLICIT DIAMOND BUYING

1.D.8. —Illicit Diamond Buying—is said to be greatly on the increase in the Transvall, in spite of severe penalties. A Kaffir caught selling' "rough" diamonds in the streets i - Kimberley (writes a South African official in the Daily Mail) would risk being lynched; any European buying from his would get a baa man-handling. If the digger caught him, even if he escaped being tarred and feathered through the town. He would neither deserve nor get sympathy; for diamond miners, white ignominious search for stolen gems at the hands of the miner's detective Mtaft' and to many humiliating regulations framed to prevent the theft of diamonds. Kaffir miners are practically prisoners in their mine, the only entrance to the Kaffiir living compounds on moat mines being a narrow underground tunnel only to be entered under the keen eyes of the detectives.

Walled in like goal yards the compounds are surrounded by high wire-netting fences to prevent thieves inside throwing diamonds 10 outside accomplices. The black miners live in iron huts inside the walls and do not leave the mine until their three or six months' con tract has expired. A thorough search is then made of their huts, clothing and belongings ,and, if sus picion warrants, the suspect :s even put under X-rays. ' Despite these precautions and , lh>. vigilance of the mines' detective staffs the ease with which rough diamonds can be concealed stili makes systematic theft a flourishing D usiness.

Thieves show vast ingenuity in aevising hiding places. Stolen stones have been discovered behind eyelids, under finger-nails, in ears and between the toes, embedded in food and even stuck with lumps of ciay like warts on the Kaffiirs dirty face Since every untraced theft brands every nigger as an undetected diamond thief, it is not surprising to hear that the diggers have-se.nt a deputation to Capetown urging that drastic penalties, including flogging penal servitude, and deporcation, •&(. added to the heavy fines and imprisonment now meted out to illicit dia mond buyers.

But even the prospect of a . lift sentence on Capetown's brcakwatei may not hold back the crook from the lure of the 1.D.8. For huge for.u nes have been made from the stolen diamond not only at the Cape' out on the Beurs of Amsterdam, on Vienna's Wahringstrasser, in Berlin, and mayhap even in Hatton Garden, for in all the word's great diamond markets agenits of the 1.D.8. men carry on their trade.