THE WHITE right-wing leader, Eugene Terre Blanche, was convicted by a South African court in Potchefstroom yesterday of trying to murder a black employee and assaulting another black man.
"The accused is found guilty on both charges," the magistrate, Mr Chris Eksteen, ruled.
Immediately after the magistrate spoke, Terre Blanche (52) jumped from his seat in the dock and told Mr Eksteen: "May God watch over you for what you have said. It will echo in the homes of every Boer (Afrikaner)."
Fighting back tears, Terre Blanche added: You have become the accomplice of the African National Congress ... You are a traitor the judgment is a political judgment.
As his followers jammed into the packed courtroom broke into applause and cheered "Hear, hear," Terre Blanche walked out of the court.
The magistrate did not attempt to stop him, but said as he left the court that the outburst had prevented him from reading out his whole judgment. Sentence was not passed.
Terreblanche was convicted in 1983 of illegal possession of arms, and sentenced to two years in prison suspended for five years. The same year he was found guilty of malicious damage for his tarring and feathering of a professor who suggested that the Day of the Vow, the Afrikaners' sacred holiday, should not be revered.
In 1992 he figured in a celebrated court case involving a leading South African journalist, Ms Jani Allan, with whom he had been haying an affair.
Meanwhile, the former South African defence minister, Gen Magnus Malan, volunteered yesterday to testify before South Africa's truth commission, becoming one of the most senior apartheid era security chiefs to do so.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said in a statement he had an hour long meeting with Gen Malan in Cape Town at the general's request.
"He informed me that he is willing to testify before the commission to help us obtain a complete picture of the role which the former South African Defence Force played," Dr Tutu said.
"I welcome very warmly Gen Malan's initiative," he added, without saying when the general would testify.
Gen Malan (67) became chief of the defence force in 1976, the year that widespread student riots marked the start of the intensification of armed struggle and guerrilla war against the whiteled government.
He served as defence minister for most of the 1980s and was seen as a protege of the then president, P.W. Botha, who struggled to maintain apartheid in the face of pressure from abroad and in creasing protests at home.
Gen Malan and, 19 others, including several fellow defence force generals, were acquitted last year on murder charges arising from the killing of 13 blacks in the KwaZulu Natal settlement off KwaMakuta.
The prosecution failed during the trial to prove that the Defence Force was directly responsible for the killing, one of scores of massacres during a decade of feuding between President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.