JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African white far-right leader Eugene Terre’blanche, who fought to prevent the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, was beaten and hacked to death at his farm yesterday, his party said.
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.
