The Guardian. The 2003 article mentioned that "a team led by Mr. Naki went to work, a 48-hour marathon" to remove the donor heart. The Associated Press cited a reliance on previous (1993 and 2003) Associated Press articles. Evidence cited in 2005 that Naki was not present at the first transplant included: Surgeons at the hospital where the 1967 transplantation was performed "assured" The Economist that Naki "was nowhere near the operating theatre." The Economist reported that "a source close to" Naki said that Naki said that he had heard of the first heart transplant "on the radio." The chief of the laboratory in which Naki worked as of 1967 stated that Naki at the time was a scrub nurse and that Victor Pick was the surgical assistant; Naki became surgical assistant only after Pick died in the early 1970s and only "at the experimental surgical operating table." Hickman was quoted as saying that Naki "was an honest man and he wouldn't have made that claim [of being present at the 1967 transplanation]". Filmmaker Dirk de Villiers stated that he heard Naki "tell other people" that he assisted in the transplant but did not say this to de Villiers in private. David Dent, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Cape Town University as of 2005, asserted that he worked with Naki "on transplanting pigs' livers" in 1967, but that technicians such as Naki did not perform surgeries in hospitals. In a letter to BMJ, Dent wrote that Naki "did not participate in the first heart transplant, did not ever operate on humans, nor ever work in Groote Schuur Hospital…. The suggestion that Hamilton Naki performed the donor operation was never mentioned in life by the man himself, by the department of cardiac surgery, or by the university in his citation for his honorary degree in 2003. It was not mentioned after his death at his family funeral, or at the memorial service in the medical school experimental laboratory." Chris Logan, author of a biography of Barnard, wrote that Naki "did not at any stage assist in the first or subsequent human heart transplant operations, nor could he have done under the apartheid laws at the time". It was effectively illegal for blacks to do surgery on whites under apartheid, and it is beyond the bounds of probability that an untrained black technician would have been permitted to