Two of the apartheid era’s chief law enforcers pleaded guilty yesterday to trying to assassinate the man who is now the personal aide to President Mbeki of South Africa by lacing his underwear with poison.

Adriaan Vlok, a former law and order minister, and General Johann Van der Merwe, his top policeman, were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. But the sentences were suspended under plea bargain deals.

Three police security agents who carried out the attempted killing of the Reverend Frank Chikane also received suspended sentences.

There was an air of poignancy in Pretoria’s High Court as Vlok and Van der Merwe, who served together in the last apartheid government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sat in the dock with Mr Chikane behind them in the public gallery. Twenty years ago, at the height of the whites-only National Party government crackdown on black opponents, the position might have been reversed.

Outlining the case against the pair, Anton Ackerman, the state prosecutor, said that both men were present at a meeting of the National Security Council when a decision was taken to kill prominent anti-government activists “in extreme cases”.

In 1989 Mr Chikane, then secretary-general of the South Africa Council of Churches, was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle. Vlok and Van der Merwe approved a plot for a special unit of the police security branch to target him. Police officers Chris Smith, Gert Otto and Manie van Staden — in the dock yesterday with their chiefs — were given a nerve poison, called Paraxon, by a police doctor, Andre Immelman, and told to lace the clothes of Mr Chikane with it. They gained access to Mr Chikane’s suitcase at Johannesburg airport as he prepared to leave on a trip to Namibia.

Mr Chikane quickly became seriously ill, suffering respiratory problems, abdominal pain, vomiting and muscular pains. He was flown back to Johannesburg, close to death. He left the impregnated clothes behind, so doctors did not know what was wrong. “They just battled to keep me alive,” Mr Chikane, now director-general of the President’s Office in South Africa, said. “I was in a mess. My whole system was falling apart.”

The Vlok prosecution has caused huge controversy in South Africa, with some groups arguing that he has paid insufficiently for his crime, while others argue that it threatens the whole process of forgiveness and reconciliation that has been one of the hallmarks of post-apartheid South Africa. Outside court Vlok, 70, a born-again Christian who a year ago washed Mr Chikane’s feet in a public act of penitence and atonement, told reporters: “Obey the Lord and He will heal our land.”

Mr Chikane had welcomed the move to prosecute, saying that although he had forgiven his former enemies the action would help to bring closure to other victims. “There is neither a witch-hunt nor the targeting of Afrikaners,” he said.

At the end of the trial, Vlok and Van der Merwe both shook hands with Mr Chikane, who said to journalists: “I must say I am pleased that this thing is over and we can move forward. I hope that whatever happened today can be used as a way of resolving all the outstanding issues.”

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