JOHANNESBURG (AP) — It's been a long time since the city of Johannesburg has been in the news A South African court has found a preacher guilty of planning to destroy the government and murder thousands of Black people.
Harry Johannes Knoesen, a 61-year-old leader of the National Christian Resistance Movement, was found guilty of high treason, incitement to carry out violent actions, and recruiting people to carry out assaults on Monday.According to the prosecution, Knoesen's organization looked into the idea of employing a biological weapon to infect and kill Black people, including poisoning water reservoirs that supply Black areas.
The Middelburg High Court also found Knoesen guilty of illegally possessing guns. When he was apprehended in Middelburg, a tiny town in the eastern Mpumalanga province, weapons and ammunition were discovered.
South African police and intelligence agencies disrupted the pastor's group's plot in 2019, and have since disbanded the organization's cells around the country and detained several of its leaders.Knoesen was found guilty based on testimony from witnesses, including members of his group who are already serving prison sentences for similar offenses.
The state claimed that Knoesen's plot was motivated by his "extremely racial ideas" and that he tried to justify his convictions by stating that he was anointed to "reclaim South Africa for white people" through religion.
The Associated Press quoted Monica Nyuswa, a spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority, as saying, "To pursue this objective, he wanted to attack government institutions, more notably police and military organizations."According to her, he also highlighted townships and informal communities inhabited by Black South Africans as potential targets for attack.
Knoesen is accused of inciting violence against Black people on Facebook and recruiting former members of the South African military to join his movement and carry out the planned attacks. When he was apprehended in November 2019, the plot was thwarted, and the cells in various regions of the country were disbanded.
According to the Middelburg Observer newspaper, Knoesen revealed in his evidence that he shared "recipes" for making bombs with his Facebook followers.This isn't the first time in South Africa that a racist, traitorous scheme has been discovered.
Twenty members of the right-wing white supremacy organisation known as the Boeremag were condemned to prison in 2013 for preparing to assassinate South Africa's first Black president Nelson Mandela, destroy the government, and murder tens of thousands of Black people.
Following a 10-year treason trial, one of the country's longest, they were given penalties ranging from five to 35 years.
That organisation, like Knoesen's, was hostile to South Africa's democracy, which abolished apartheid, the country's system of white minority rule, which ended in 1994 with Mandela's victory as president in the country's first democratic elections.
Knoesen is scheduled to return to court on June 10 to begin sentencing proceedings.
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