Police said two black workers in custody for the killing of Terre’blanche, 69, appeared to have been angry over unpaid wages rather than having had a political motive for the killing.
But his Afrikaner Resistance Movement linked it to the recent singing of an apartheid-era song with the lyrics “Kill the Boer,“ by the head of the ruling ANC party’s youth league in a row that has drawn fears of growing racial polarisation.
“That’s what this is all about,” said Andre Visagie, a spokesman for the AWB. “They used pangas (machetes) and pipes to murder him as he slept.”
Terre’blanche, who described himself as a Boer, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of white minority rule, but had lived in relative obscurity since his release from prison in 2004 after serving a sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.
His party — whose flag resembles a Nazi swastika — was revived two years ago and he had begun efforts to try to build a united front among white far-right parties to fight for a white homeland, but had gained little traction.
