TIMES ONLINE: The gunman leant forward and pushed the pistol hard into Manie Potgieter’s neck. “Listen, you white bastard,” he whispered, his breath heavy with alcohol. “I have Aids. We are now going to rape your wife and give her Aids too. Then, we kill you, got it?”
From his position on the floor, hands tied behind his back, he could hear his assailant’s three accomplices pulling the tracksuit bottoms off his wife, Helena, 28.
“I was sure they were going to shoot me, but I just prayed she would be OK. She was telling me in Afrikaans not to worry. I just prayed,” Mr Potgieter, 30, a blond giant of a man, told The Times.
Suddenly, a clang of metal echoed through the early morning air — and the attackers took fright. They had been in the remote farmhouse for an hour and dawn was fast approaching. “Let’s go, someone is coming,” one of them shouted in panic. Without firing a shot they were suddenly gone.
The Potgieters’ nightmare was over — but it was one of the very few happy endings to a spate of attacks on South Africa’s white Afrikaner farming communities in which an estimated 3,000 people have been killed since 1994. >>> Jonathan Clayton in Vredefort | Wednesday, May 05, 2010
