adminA second man, who was a minor at the time of the April 2010 murder, was found guilty of housebreaking in Ventersdorp, a farming community about 125km west of Johannesburg where Terre’blanche owned a farm.
The case has served as a reminder of the bitter historical divisions in a country now dubbed the “Rainbow Nation” and ruled by the African National Congress, the party that helped end apartheid in 1994.
Many see Terre’blanche as a relic from a bygone era, with his murder doing little to stir fresh racial tension.
“After all the evidence given, I conclude that accused number one is guilty as charged,” said Judge John Horn.
Prosecutors said Mahlangu and his co-accused broke into Terre’blanche’s home, where they found the 71-year-old asleep and bludgeoned him to death with an axe.
Terre’blanche, a burly man known for his thick white beard and fiery rhetoric, led the hardline supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement.
Its members adopted military uniforms and flags with a symbol reminiscent of the Nazi swastika, and called for an all-white homeland in post-apartheid South Africa.
A small group of his armed supporters attempted a coup in the black-run “homeland” of Bophuthatswana shortly before the first all-race elections in April 1994 but retreated after meeting resistance from security forces.
Graphic images of three AWB men being shot dead at point blank range in the middle of a road by a Bophuthatswana policeman marked the end of any AWB pretensions to be a serious military force. — Reuters.
Online Reporter
Bongani Ndlovu