Inside Story — Season 11

Aired 13 May 1992

Last year, in America, 682 men were killed by their wives or girlfriends. That is the tip of an iceberg in which an estimated three or four million women are physically and psychologically battered and abused by their partners each year. Some kill to escape their predicament, but in many cases the courts will not let these women explain what motivated them. A life sentence is not unusual and some women are even sentenced to death. In this programme prisoners in Alabama and Texas reveal how they came to commit such acts.

Aired 20 May 1992

The lives and times of British mercenaries fighting in the Yugoslavia Civil War, earning as little as £100 a month in the Yugoslavia army's only English speaking company.

Aired 27 May 1992

Just when majority rule is in sight, South Africa's black townships are in despair. Murders, rapes, broken families and abandoned babies are at record levels, and nowhere is the crisis greater than in Soweto, where the rebellion against apartheid began. This film focuses on the sprawling township's hospital, which every night is packed with the broken, bleeding bodies from another day's violence. Against all the odds, the hospital staff struggle to save the victims of a community at war with itself. More than 100 victims of assault arrive in the casualty department every night. Bernard Rabinowitz , a surgeon at the vast Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, says: "We get 3,500 to 5,550 stabbed chests and 5,000 to 7,000 bad head injuries - every year." And now, adding to this suffering, is an increasing Aids problem.

Aired 3 June 1992

The investigative documentary series goes on the buses to take the pulse of a city that is grinding to a halt. Driving one of London's famous red buses has become a nightmare. One veteran double-decker driver, John Elwood , fears for his health: "I've driven a red bus for 33 years, but now the stress is too much. I've got a real blood pressure problem." Traffic congestion, irate passengers, bomb alerts and the threat of privatisation are constant hazards facing the busmen and women of a capital city on the brink of crisis.

Aired 10 June 1992

The investigative documentary series reveals the story of Russia's master spies - known as the "illegals" or "sleepers". "We take a standard Russian," explains one retired illegal, "and turn him into a standard Canadian. Then we infiltrate him into another country and let him burrow his way into the highest levels of government, army or establishment. This takes years, but we are patient." Despite the end of the Cold War, spies are still a vital ingredient of all governments in Russia - whether communist or would-be capitalist. But they are now denied the ease of operating from embassies under diplomatic cover, so Moscow's rulers are even more dependent upon the elite of Russia's intelligence officers whose activities have until now been shrouded in secrecy.

Aired 17 June 1992

Police on Humberside have set up four specialist units to deal solely with the growing number of reported child abuse cases. At Tower Grange police station in Hull, eight specially trained detectives are investigating over 35 cases a month. The police unit works closely with the local social services, pooling their skills to ensure that the cases are efficiently and sensitively handled, and that the victims of abuse, and their families, are properly supported. For the first time, a film team follows the police and social workers as they tackle an alleged case of sexual abuse - from the first disclosure by one of the victims, through the police investigation to the trial.

Aired 9 September 1992

When British soldiers shot dead 24 Chinese "terrorists" in Malaya in December 1948 it was said to be one of the most successful operations in the war against the communists. However, the truth of what happened in this tiny Malayan village has haunted the British army for more than 40 years. Eye-witnesses claim that the dead were unarmed, innocent civilians, who were shot down in cold blood. Wong Ying, who was one of the witnesses to the incident, says: "In my mind it was an atrocity. No questions asked, no investigations. It was a cruel slaughter." Eric Lazenby and Don Houlston, the first soldiers to come upon the carnage in the days after the shooting, were never told exactly what their friends had done. Returning to the scene of the killing, they try to unravel the mystery.

Aired 16 September 1992

Hidden cameras expose a cruel "flesh trade" in which thousands of women from poor countries are lured to Europe for jobs that turn out to be in the sex industry. In strange cities, and without money or passports, they are tricked and trapped into unwilling prostitution, and many fear shame, debt and reprisals if they speak out. One woman who expected to be employed as a barmaid says: "On the first day I knew what they had told us in Poland was one big lie. We couldn't move because we had almost no money and no passport. We were just scared really. The boss looked as if he could kill you if something wasn't going the way he wanted."

Aired 23 September 1992

Maggie carries all she owns in a bag. At 42 she has lived much of the last 20 years on the streets of London, where robbery and attacks are common. What led Maggie, once a social worker, to abandon her promising career for this precarious way of life? And what is the fatal accident she drinks to forget? The story of Maggie's road to ruin provides a remarkable insight into life on our streets.

Aired 30 September 1992

For the first time, the man the FBI described as "the perfect assassin, the very essence of evil: a man so blindly, terrifyingly obedient he would kill anyone, anywhere, without hesitation" tells his story. The son of wealthy, well-travelled parents, Michael Townley was an unlikely assassin. Yet both he and his wife were agents of DINA, the Chilean secret police, who were as ruthless as the Gestapo. Inside Story reveals how a reasonable, quite ordinary man crossed an invisible line into a world of torture and death, convincing himself that murder was moral - even normal.

Aired 7 October 1992

As many as one in five women in prison in Britain today is a Nigerian woman convicted of smuggling drugs into the UK. Driven by desperation and poverty, the women swallow the drugs in packages or stuff them into body orifices. Inside Story follows HM Customs and Excise at work at Heathrow Airport and talks to the women in prison themselves who reveal their heart-breaking stories as the victims of the drug trade.

Aired 14 October 1992

This film goes behind the scenes with a south London undertaking firm as they visit grieving families, collect bodies from hospital mortuaries, embalm them and prepare them for view. From the makers of the recent Town Hall series, it provides a rare glimpse inside the secret world of the funeral parlour and dispels many myths about the business of death.