Pretoria, South Africa - (Arse Mess): A former South African police minister and his ex-police chief pleaded guilty today to an innovative attempt to murder black anti-apartheid activist Frank Chikane by lacing his pants with arsenic.
Adriaan Vlok and Johann van der Merwe told the judge it was a 'bit of a giggle really' because they'd meant to use a more reliable toxin like strychnine or plutomium 210 "but all we could find in the Pretoria PD poisons' cupboard was some leftover arsenic from a previous attempt on Nelson Mandela's life".
Vlok and van der Merwe were given ten year sentences, suspended for five years, after the judge accepted their plea bargain.
They told the court in their defence that target of their murder attempt was a bit of a ladies man and they thought it would serve him right if something toxic "attacked his penis" before slowly poisoning him to death.
So they soaked some of his Y-Fronts which undercover cops had stolen to order, and when the aresenic dried placed them in Chikane's underwear drawer.
"Sure we had a good laugh when we heard he thought his erection was suddenly killing him one evening after he'd changed into clean clothing before going out on a night on the town to a lap-dancing club!" Vlok admitted in court today.
Chikane was taken ill and eventually hospital treatment revealed that poison had attacked his nervous system, making him violently toxic.
As part of his sentence Vlok was ordered to wash Chikane's soiled underwear in public last year "in an act of hugely symbolic contrition for a bad-assed white man", his attorneys said today.
Asked by reporters after today's hearing about the motives behind their heinous attack, Vlok could only say that their target's name - Chikane - "sounds an awful lot like 'Chicanery', meaning trickery, dectption and subterfuge.
"And we thought we had a damned good chance of getting away with it too!"
