By Tara Brady
PUBLISHED: 08:21 EST, 29 October 2013 | UPDATED: 09:10 EST, 29 October 2013
The mastermind behind a white supremacist plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela and drive black people out of South Africa has been sentenced to 35 years in prison after a trial which has lasted more than 10 years.
Former university lecturer Mike du Toit was convicted of high treason for his leadership role in the Boeremag - a rag-tag militia of apartheid loyalists accused of a botched 2002 coup attempt to overthrow the ruling African National Congress.
At least one other leader of the group also received a 35-year sentence at the Pretoria High Court, while others among the 20 defendants were handed lesser sentences.
Defendants included Du Toit's brother Andre.
Mike du Toit was found guilty in July last year after witnesses testified that the group planned to assassinate Mr Mandela, South Africa's first black president from 1994 to 1999 and acting as a unifying force after decades of white-minority rule.
The decade-long trial is believed to have cost taxpayers more than R30million or £1.89million in legal aid fees.
Du Toit drew up a document that served as a blueprint for a revolution that would see the majority black population driven out of South Africa and a white-only military government installed.
Witnesses told the court how in a series of meetings with co-plotters, Du Toit discussed luring black citizens towards the country's northern border using food as bait and making allies of its Indian and Cape people, before shooting them once the coup had reached its aim.
Document 12, Du Toit's 'war plan', was discovered on his computer after police raided his house in October 2001, reported in South Africa's Business Day newspaper at the time.
He discussed creating a 'trigger' for his coup by blowing up a major dam, shooting down a Boeing aeroplane, assassinating Mr Mandela or cutting electricity to major cities, the paper added.
'President Nelson Mandela would have to be murdered because he was still seen as a peace figure,' one part of the document is reported to have read.
A court in Pretoria ruled that Boeremag leader du Toit was behind the nine bombings in Johannesburg's Soweto township in 2002.
During the trial Judge Eben Jordaan said Du Toit had authored a blueprint for revolution intended to evict black people from most of South Africa and to kill anyone who got in the way.
The group also intended to shoot whites who opposed their vision of a racially pure nation, the witnesses said.
Nearly 200 people gave evidence for the state - including police informants within Boeremag.
The trial took place in the same Pretoria courtroom where Mandela was convicted of treason in 1964.
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