The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
White terror group jailed
Twenty members of a white extremist group have been jailed from five to 35 years for treason and plotting to kill Nelson Mandela in the country’s first postapartheid treason trial.
Judge Eben Jordaan handed the sentences out inPretoria toendthe decade-long trial.
Some sentences were suspended due to time already served.
The members of the Afrikaner extremist group Boeremag, or white farmer force, were found guilty last year of treason for a plot, in the late 1990s and early 2000, to overthrow the government.
The African National Congress formed the country’s government when Mr Mandela was elected to office in 1994 to bring an end to white minority rule.
Some were also convicted of culpable homicide and conspiring to murder Mr Mandela.
The group also claimed responsibility for a series of bombings that killed a woman and caused damage throughout the Johannesburg towns hip o f Soweto in 2002.
The leader of the group and four of its bomb squad were given some of the longest sentences.
They planted a bomb on a road Mr Mandela was going to take for a visit to a school in Limpopo Province, but the plot was foiled when the anti-apartheid leader changed his plans and took a helicopter to the school.
Having already served 10 years, those getting the heaviest sentences will serve 25 more.
Two of the accused died during the trial. A mobile phone saved a Florida filling station worker from a robber’s bullet.
Winter Garden Police said a clerk had only minor injuries after a robber fired a bullet at his stomach. Officers say that his mobile phone stopped it.
The close call hap- pened at 4.45am in Winter Garden, a suburb of Orlando. A man entered the filling station, brandished a revolver and demanded they open the safe. But neither of the clerks could open the safe door.
The suspect fired a round at one of the clerks and fled.