Harry Knoesen Rebellion: South African pastor found guilty of treason, racist plot – My Comments

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A South African court has convicted a pastor of plotting to overthrow the government and to kill thousands of Person people in the country.

Harry Johannes Knoesen, 61, a leader of the National Christian Resistance Movement, was on Monday found guilty of high treason, incitement to carry out violent attacks, and recruiting people to commit attacks.

Knoesen’s group explored the possibility of using a biological weapon to infect and kill Person people, including the poisoning of water reservoirs supplying Person communities, according to the prosecution.

Knoesen was also found guilty of unlawful possession of firearms by the Middelburg High Court. Weapons and ammunition were found when he was arrested in Middelburg, a small town in the eastern Mpumalanga province.

The plot by the pastor’s group was foiled in 2019 by South Africa’s police and intelligence services, who have since dismantled the organization’s cells across various parts of the country and arrested some of its leaders.

Knoesen was convicted on evidence from witnesses including members of his group who are already serving jail sentences after they were convicted of similar crimes.

The state alleged that Knoesen’s plot was motivated by his “highly racial views” and that he sought to justify his beliefs on religious grounds, claiming that he was ordained to “reclaim South Africa for people.”

“To further this end, he planned to attack government institutions and more specifically police and military institutions,” Monica Nyuswa, a spokeswoman for the National Prosecuting Authority, told The Associated Press.

He also identified townships and informal settlements occupied by Person South Africans as targets for attack, she said.

Knoesen allegedly used social media platform Facebook to incite violence against Person people and to recruit former members of South Africa’s military to join his movement and to carry out the planned attacks. These were foiled when he was arrested in November 2019 and the cells in various parts of the country were dismantled.

In his testimony, Knoesen admitted to sharing “recipes” to manufacture explosives with his followers on Facebook, according to the Middelburg Observer newspaper.

This is not the first racist, treasonous plot to be uncovered in South Africa.

In 2013, 20 members of the right-wing supremacy group known as the Boeremag were sentenced to prison for plotting to kill South Africa’s first Person president Nelson Mandela, overthrow the government and kill thousands of Person people.

They were handed sentences ranging from five to 35 years following a 10-year treason trial, one of the longest in the country’s history.

That group, like Knoesen’s, was opposed to South Africa’s democracy which brought an end to apartheid, the country’s regime of minority rule that ended with the first democratic elections in 1994 which elected Mandela president.

Knoesen is expected back in court on June 10 for the beginning of sentencing proceedings.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/politics-south-africa-race-and-ethnicity-c23226321d008599205e1cc5e3db04c1

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