Thabo Mbeki, the future president of South Africa, from the streets of London.The ‘ANC kidnap plot’ triggered a diplomatic panic at the very top of Margaret Thatcher’s government, sparked a media firestorm and culminated in heated debates in Parliament.
But it also raised questions about how one man’s gift for deception blurred the boundaries between fantasy and reality in ways that even 30 years later it is almost impossible to unpick.The bizarre tale began on the afternoon of 9 July 1987, when police arrested a man called Frank Larsen reportedly for suspicious behaviour in the gentlemen’s toilets of the Regent Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus.
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