New inquest into Nobel laureate's death gets underway

A South African court today started re-examining the circumstances around the death of one of the most renowned campaigners against apartheid, which had initially been described as accidental, reports BBC News. A 1967 inquest ruled that Chief Albert Luthuli was walking on a railway line when he was struck by a train and died after fracturing his skull. Activists and his family have long cast doubt on the official version of events, and have said they welcomed the re-opening of the inquest. Luthuli, who at the time of his death was the leader of the then-banned African National Congress ANC), won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 for spearheading the fight against apartheid. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has said that it ‘will be presenting evidence before the court in an attempt to have the initial findings into the deaths of Chief Luthuli... overturned’. It has not said what that evidence is. Nearly six decades ago, the initial inquiry into the Nobel laureate's death ‘found that there was no evidence which disclosed any criminal culpability on the part of any of the employees of the South African Railways or anyone else’, the NPA said last week. But campaigners suspected the apartheid authorities had killed him and covered it up.

At the time of his death, Luthuli was not allowed to leave his residential area in Groutville – now in the  KwaZulu-Natal province – or take part in politics. The Luthuli case is one of two highly anticipated inquests into the deaths of anti-apartheid figures which re-opened last week. The other concerns lawyer Mlungisi Griffiths Mxenge, who was killed in 1981, according to BBC News. He had been stabbed 45 times and his throat had been slit. An inquest into his death a year later failed to identify his murderers and it was only nine years later that they were revealed – when Butana Almond Nofemela, confessed to killing Mxenge and seven other ANC members. He was part of a covert hit-squad, or counter-insurgency unit, that detained and killed anti-apartheid activists. Nofemela, together with the squad's commander Dirk Coetzee and David Tshikalange, were in 1997 found guilty of Mxenge's murder but were granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission before the criminal case could be concluded.

Full BBC News report