TUESDAY, 3.30PM
NINETEEN-year-old Daniel Coetzee was sentenced on Tuesday to 40 years’ imprisonment for his part in the Christmas Eve Worcester double bombing, in which a woman and three children were killed and more than 50 people injured when two bombs exploded among Christmas shoppers in the Western Cape town.
Coetzee was on Monday convicted in the Cape Town High Court of four counts of murder, three of attempted murder and two charges of terrorism. Coetzee pleaded guilty to the murder and attempted murder charges, and admitted involvement in the double bombing.
Co-accused, Johannes van der Westhuizen, Nicolas Clifton Barnard and Abraham Myburgh have pleaded not guilty and will go on trial in the High Court next month.
The four men allegedly planted three bombs, one inside a shopping centre, another outside a pharmacy, and a third in a dam on the Ceres-Wolseley road, on December 24 last year. Only the bombs at the supermarket and the pharmacy exploded.
Coetzee told the court he was an impressionable teenager when he took part in the bombings. Testifying in mitigation of sentence, he said the other three men belonged to a cult of white supremacists called the Israel Vision, which believes that anyone who is not white is an “animal of the field” and that was why they had “no scruples in murdering them”.
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