Pastor Found Guilty of Treason and Racist Plotting in South Africa

A South African court found a pastor guilty of planning to remove the government from power and in the process assassinate thousands of the Black population.

Born in 1952, Harry Johannes Knoesen, a man who headed the National Christian Resistance Movement, was found guilty of high treason, incitement to violence, and recruitment of participants in violent acts.

The prosecution stated that Knoesen’s group discussed the use of a biological weapon to infect and kill the Blacks, including the poisoning of water sources supplying black populations.

The Middelburg High Court also convicted Knoesen for unlawful possession of firearms. Firearms and ammunition were seized from him when he was arrested in Middelburg, a small town in the eastern part of Mpumalanga province.

The plan by the pastor’s group was successfully thwarted in 2019 by the police and intelligence agencies in South Africa, and the formation has since been neutralized in various provinces and some members were arrested.

Knoesen was convicted based on testimonies of witnesses such as members of the same group as the accused who are serving their jail term after they were found guilty of the same offences.

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On the state’s assertion, both the indictment and testimony suggested that Knoesen’s plot was severely informed by his racially charged beliefs and cultural prejudice, claiming he was under divine orders to “reclaim South Africa for white 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.

She added that he also pointed out townships and urban residences of black South Africans as other vulnerable areas to attack.

Knoesen, reportedly, planned and coordinated the violence through his Facebook account, and enlisted the assistance of previously employed personnel of the South African military to execute the violent acts against black individuals. These were aborted when he was arrested in November 2019 and when cells that had been set up in different parts of the country began to be closed.

Knoesen, in his testimony, said he had used Facebook to pass what he regarded as recipes needed to make explosives to his disciples, as reported by the Middelburg Observer newspaper.