The Pretoria magistrate’s court handed Robert McBride a two-year jail term for driving under the influence of alcohol and five years for defeating the ends of justice. Two years of the second term were suspended.

“Instead of coming clean, you did everything possible to cover your tracks… you are indeed an evil person,” the Pretoria News quoted regional court magistrate Peet Johnson as saying.

McBride was found guilty in April this year after he crashed a state-owned car in 2006 while head of the metro police in the Ekurhuleni region, which neighbours Johannesburg.

According to the charge sheet, McBride allegedly asked a doctor to draw blood from a subordinate after the crash last December and then tried to obtain a false medical certificate stating he was sober at the time of the accident.

He is also accused of ordering another subordinate to tell a witness not to cooperate with officers investigating the crash near Pretoria.

McBride gained notoriety in the 1980s for bombing the beachfront Magoo’s Bar in the eastern city of Durban, killing three people and injuring dozens during the anti-apartheid struggle.

He was sentenced to death but was granted a reprieve and later received amnesty during South Africa’s post-apartheid reconciliation process.

In 1998, when a senior foreign ministry official, McBride was arrested on suspicion of gun running in neighbouring Mozambique and held for six months before being released.

He is appealing this week’s sentence and his bail of 1,000 rands ($138, 100 euros) was extended.

Following a challenge by Capetonian Clifford Hendricks to the reliability of the Dräger breathalyser – introduced by authorities in 2009 as a means of determining the sobriety of drivers – Judge Nathan Erasmus ruled the Dräger system in the province should be suspended until concerns over the system are resolved.

Acquitting Hendricks of the drunk-driving charges against him, Erasmus said the Dräger’s software needed to be modified, a temperature sensor added, and that suspected offenders needed to provide two breath samples rather than one.

Hendricks’s argument to the court, brought by his advocate, Derek Mitchell, was that he was not drunk on the night of January 23 2010, and blood should have been taken to determine his sobriety.

Hendricks challenged the validity, accuracy and the reliability of the Dräger over its results, which determined that he was four times over the legal limit.

Among other things, he disputed that the Dräger functioned properly, that the officer operating it was qualified to do so, that it was capable of determining the alcohol level on his breath.