Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week the Sri Lankan journalist who predicted his own murder.

He walked with death and he often talked with me about the likelihood of the government killing him.

But he was never afraid.

Also South Africa's first multiracial election.

For those of us who had no right to vote,

we had no rights whatsoever.

We come from an awful history and so that was an extraordinary day

And from 1999 the NATO bombing of Serbia

I don't hear an explosion because we are in explosion. I was buried to my neck. I think that I'm dead.

That's all coming up later in the podcast. But before all that we're going to look at the biggest arms deal in British history.

It was in April 1985 that the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher held a private meeting with King Fard of Saudi Arabia, a meeting that would lead to the signing of the

Al-Yamama defence contracts. The deal involved the sale of tens of billions of dollars

worth of British military aircraft to Saudi Arabia over decades.

Louis Hidalgo has been talking to the former British Defence Minister and Thatcher biographer Jonathan Aikkin

about the deal and the controversy which has dogged it ever since.

The Prime Minister's plane landed at Riyadh's magnificent airport in the middle of the South

In April 1985,

Margaret Thatcher was on her way back from an official trip to India

when she made an unscheduled stop in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis had been talking to the British for some time

...