FOUR members of South Africa's neo nazi AWB movement remained at large yesterday after escaping from the Diepkloof high security prison in Johannesburg.
The four men are among 18 members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging - Afrikaner Resistance Movement - charged with murdering 21 people two years ago in a series of no warning bombings on city streets. The attacks were part of an unsuccessful attempt to disrupt South Africa's first multiracial elections. Judgment in the case is expected in two weeks' time.
A few hours after their escape was discovered on Saturday morning, and before it had been announced, the AWB leader, Mr Eugene TerreBlanche, told several hundred supporters in Germiston, east Johannesburg, that if the government did not free all AWB prisoners the "Boers" would go to the prison and free the prisoners themselves.
Police said they believed the four men might have had inside help in escaping from the prison. The doors to their cells had been unlocked and the escapers found means to break through two security doors before escaping through a reinforced steel service exit.
With them escaped a fifth prisoner, a black man awaiting sentence for an unrelated murder. All five were described as dangerous.
At the Germiston rally Mr TerreBlanche, clad in black military fatigues, said the AWB prisoners were charged with political offences and should be entitled to the same amnesty as members of the now ruling African National Congress.
"They must bring them out of their cells or we will go and take them out," Mr TerreBlanche told a crowd of around 500 supporters dressed in military clothing, many of them armed with pistols.
Despite repeated calls from the AWB, President Nelson Mandela's coalition government has repeatedly refused to extend the cut off date for political amnesty beyond December 1993, when the ANC and National Party government agreed on South Africa's interim constitution. From that date all political violence supposedly became invalid.
The AWB vowed to prevent the 1994 elections, but its efforts collapsed after its armed supporters went uninvited to join other right wing forces in an invasion of the former homeland of Bophuthatswana. The effort collapsed after an orgy of destruction and murder when three of the AWB men were shot dead at a barricade by an enraged member of Bophuthatswana's defence forces.
The killings - captured on television - shattered the myth that Afrikaners enjoyed an almost mystical superiority over blacks. The wave of bombings which killed at least 21 people in Johannesburg ended when police arrested 30 suspects, 12 of whom were later released or discharged.
At Saturday's rally, which was to commemorate the three victims at Bophuthatswana, Mr TerreBlanche said he would never accept the multiracial government of President Nelson Mandela and was planning fresh resistance.
Peace is not coming, President Mandela. You developed the methods for conflict and revolution to take place in South Africa," he said.
Having lost its struggle to retain white control of South Africa, the AWB is now demanding the creation of a separate Afrikaner state within South Africa. If they want peace, then they must give us land where we create circumstances where there can be peace, Mr TerreBlanche said on Saturday.