Johannesburg (AP) – A South African court has convicted a pastor of plotting to overthrow the government and kill thousands of blacks in the country.
Harry Johannes Knossen, 61, leader of the National Christian Resistance Movement, was found guilty Monday of high treason, inciting violent attacks and recruiting people to carry out the attacks.
Prosecutors said Knossen’s team investigated the possibility of using biological weapons to infect and kill blacks, including poisoning the water tanks that supply black communities.
Middelburg High Court also found Knossen guilty of illegal purchase and possession of a firearm. Weapons and ammunition were found when he was arrested in the town of Middelburg, in the eastern province of Mpumalanga.
The pastoral group’s conspiracy was thwarted in 2019 by the South African police and intelligence services, which broke up the organization’s cells in various parts of the country and arrested its leaders.
Knussen was tried based on the testimony of witnesses, including members of his group, who have served sentences since they were tried for a similar crime.
The state argued that Knossen’s conspiracy was motivated by his “high racial views” and he tried to justify his belief on religious grounds, claiming he had signed off on “South Africa’s return to whites”.
“To this end, he plans to attack government institutions, and more specifically police and military institutions,” Monica News, a spokeswoman for the National Prosecutor’s Office, told The Associated Press.
He also pointed to black towns occupied by South Africa and informal communities as targets of attack, he said.
Knossen allegedly used the social media platform Facebook to incite violence against blacks and to recruit former members of the South African army to join his movement and carry out planned attacks. This was stopped when he was arrested in November 2019 and the cells were dismantled in various parts of the country.
According to the Middelburg Observer, in his testimony, Knossen admitted he shared “recipes” for making explosives with his Facebook followers.
This is not the first racist and treacherous conspiracy to be exposed in South Africa.
In 2013, 20 members of the right-wing white supremacist group were sentenced to prison for plotting to assassinate South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, overthrow the government and kill thousands of blacks.
They were sentenced to 5 to 35 years in prison after a 10-year trial for treason, one of the longest in the nation’s history.
This group, like the Knossen group, opposed South Africa’s democracy, which ended apartheid, the country’s white minority regime, which ended in its first democratic election in 1994, which elected Mandela’s president.
Knossen is expected to appear in court on June 10 to begin retrial.
Source: Huffpost
