A South African court began yesterday sentencing 20 right-wing extremists convicted of high treason for a plot to kill Nelson Mandela and drive blacks out of the country. The "Boeremag" organisation had planned a right-wing coup in 2002 to overthrow the postapartheid government.
The trial lasted almost a decade until the organisation's members were convicted in August last year — the first guilty verdicts for treason since the end of apartheid in 1994.
"The accused had aimed to overthrow the government through unconstitutional methods that included violence," said High Court judge Eben Jordaan as he began the two-day sentencing hearing.
"They planned a violent attack against people of colour that would certainly be followed by retaliation attacks against whites as a result," Jordaan said at the hearing in the same Pretoria courtroom where Mandela was convicted of treason in 1964. One woman died and dozens of people were injured in blasts that shook the Johannesburg township of Soweto in October 2002.
Source: South Africa to sentence 20 extremists for Mandela death plot (http://nationalmirroronline.net/new/south-africa-to-sentence-20-extremists-for-mandela-death-plot/)