"The doctors have decided to send him home as the diagnostic procedure he underwent did not indicate anything seriously wrong with him," President Jacob Zuma's office said in a statement. His departure from Pretoria's "1 Military" hospital in a multi-vehicle motorcade marks the end of an anxious 24-hour wait for South Africa's 50 million people, after Mandela was admitted on Saturday morning with "long-standing abdominal pain". The government insisted throughout there was nothing to panic about. Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said Mandela had had "investigative laparoscopy" - a tiny camera inserted into the abdomen - and denied reports he had undergone surgery for a hernia. "It wasn't the surgery that has been out there in the media at all," Sisulu told a media briefing in Cape Town. "He's fine. He's as fine as can be at his age - and handsome."