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Dutch police detained an American citizen at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. He had been behaving strangely. It was later said he was having a nervous breakdown.

The American was Joseph Lewis Popp. He was en route from Nairobi, where he had been attending a WHO seminar, to Ohio, where he lived with his parents in the small town of Willowick, near Cleveland. Popp seemed to think someone was trying to kill him: at Schipol he had written ‘Dr Popp has been poisoned’ on the suitcase of another traveller, apparently in an attempt to notify the police. When he had calmed down the authorities took a discreet look through his bags: in one, they found the company seal for PC Cyborg Corporation.

The police let Popp continue his journey on to Ohio, then notified Austen in England about the seal. On 18 January 1990 Austen began extradition proceedings. The charge: ‘That on 11 December 1989, within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court, you with a view to gain for another, viz PC Cyborg Corporation of Panama, with menaces made unwarranted demands, viz a payment of one hundred and eighty nine US dollars or three hundred and seventy eight US dollars from the victim.’

In Ohio the FBI began a surveillance of Popp’s parents’ home. He was arrested on 3 February.

Neighbours in Willowick were said to have been surprised at his arrest. Popp was described as ‘quiet, intelligent, a real gentleman’. At the time of his arrest he was thirty-nine, a zoologist and anthropologist who had worked as a consultant on animal behaviour with UNICEF and WHO. He was a soft-spoken man, dark-haired, with flecks of grey in his beard. He had graduated from Ohio State University in 1972 and obtained a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard in 1979. At some time in the previous few years he had become passionately interested in AIDS.

Austen’s extradition request ground through the American courts for nearly a year. In September 1990 Jim Bates was flown over to Cleveland for five days to give evidence at Popp’s extradition hearing. It is unusual to have live witnesses at such hearings, but Jim brought the AIDS diskette. He was the principal witness; it was his task to demonstrate to the court what the diskette was and what it did.

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