Mandela's ex-wife linked to two killings
Source: Agencies |
March 13, 2013, Wednesday
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RELATIVES sang hymns and songs from South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle yesterday as forensic scientists exhumed bodies believed to belong to two young activists last seen 24 years ago at the home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
The discovery has forced a new police investigation into the fate of the two in the late 1980s, when the then wife of Nelson Mandela was becoming increasingly militant and accused of killing out of hand people she accused of spying for the apartheid government.
Captain Paul Ramaloko said the Hawks, the police priority crime investigative unit, opened two murder dockets in the case early this year.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s found that Madikizela-Mandela was responsible for the disappearances of 21-year-old Lolo Sono and his friend Sibuniso Tshabalala, 19. They were messengers for the armed wing of the African National Congress and wanted to become freedom fighters.
Madikizela-Mandela has denied all knowledge of the two. But her chief bodyguard Jerry Richardson told the commission that he and a colleague had killed the two men on her orders.
Richardson was head of the Mandela United Football Club, a crowd of young men who acted as Madikizela-Mandela's bodyguards and also as vigilantes who, some charge, she used to get rid of enemies.
In 1991, Madikizela-Mandela was sentenced to six years in prison for kidnapping and assault in the death of 14-year-old James Seipei Moeketsi, who also had last been seen at her home and who was found beaten to death.
She appealed, the assault conviction was overturned and the sentence reduced to a suspended jail term.
The discovery has forced a new police investigation into the fate of the two in the late 1980s, when the then wife of Nelson Mandela was becoming increasingly militant and accused of killing out of hand people she accused of spying for the apartheid government.
Captain Paul Ramaloko said the Hawks, the police priority crime investigative unit, opened two murder dockets in the case early this year.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s found that Madikizela-Mandela was responsible for the disappearances of 21-year-old Lolo Sono and his friend Sibuniso Tshabalala, 19. They were messengers for the armed wing of the African National Congress and wanted to become freedom fighters.
Madikizela-Mandela has denied all knowledge of the two. But her chief bodyguard Jerry Richardson told the commission that he and a colleague had killed the two men on her orders.
Richardson was head of the Mandela United Football Club, a crowd of young men who acted as Madikizela-Mandela's bodyguards and also as vigilantes who, some charge, she used to get rid of enemies.
In 1991, Madikizela-Mandela was sentenced to six years in prison for kidnapping and assault in the death of 14-year-old James Seipei Moeketsi, who also had last been seen at her home and who was found beaten to death.
She appealed, the assault conviction was overturned and the sentence reduced to a suspended jail term.
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