South African pastor Harry Johannes Knoesen, 61, a leader of the National Christian Resistance Movement, was found guilty of high treason, inciting to carry out violent attacks and recruiting people to commit attacks.
According to the prosecution, Knoesen’s group explored the possibility of using a biological weapon to infect and kill black South Africans, including poisoning the water reservoirs that supply their communities. Knoesen was also found guilty of illegal possession of firearms by the High Court in Middelburg. Weapons and ammunition were found when he was arrested in Middelburg, a small town in the eastern province of Mpumalanga.
The pastor’s plot was foiled in 2019 by the South African police and intelligence services, who dismantled cells of the organization and arrested some of its leaders.
Knoesen was convicted on evidence provided by several witnesses, including members of his group who were already serving jail sentences after being convicted of similar crimes.
The State alleged that Knoesen’s plot was motivated by his “highly racist views” and that he tried to justify his beliefs on religious grounds, claiming that he was ordered to “reclaim South Africa for whites”. “To further this end, he planned to attack government institutions, and more specifically police and military institutions,” said Monica Nyuswa, the spokeswoman for the National Prosecutor’s Office.
It also identified townships and informal settlements occupied by black South Africans as targets for attack. Knoesen used the social media platform Facebook to incite violence against black South Africans and to recruit former members of the military to join his movement and carry out the planned attacks.
But they were foiled when he was arrested in November 2019. In his testimony, Knoesen admitted to sharing “recipes” for making explosives with his Facebook followers. This is not the first racist and treacherous plot to be uncovered in South Africa. In 2013, twenty members of the white supremacist group known as Boeremag they were sentenced to prison for wanting to kill the first black president, Nelson Mandela, overthrow the government, and execute thousands of black people. They received sentences ranging from five to 35 years after a treason trial, one of the longest in the country’s history.
That group, like Knoesen’s, opposed democracy in South Africa that ended apartheid, the white minority regime that ended with the first democratic elections in 1994 that elected Mandela as president.
Associated Press/OnCuba.
