POLITICS

Eugene Terre'blanche murdered

The South African far-right leader was beaten and hacked to death at his farm on Saturday.
South African white far-right leader Eugene Terre'blanche, who fought to preserve apartheid in the early 1990s, was beaten and hacked to death at his farm on Saturday. "He was hacked to death while he was taking a nap," one family friend, a member of Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), told Reuters, requesting anonymity. Local media quoted another party member as saying he was beaten with pipes and machetes. Police in the town of Ventersdorp said two men were in custody over the killing and the motive was unclear. Terre'blanche had lived in relative obscurity despite the revival of his party two years ago and recent efforts to form a united front among white far-right groups. The killing comes at a time of worries over increasing racial polarization in South Africa, heightened by a row over the singing of a song by the head of the ruling ANC party's youth league with the lyrics "Kill the Boer." Terre'blanche always described himself as a Boer. Terre'Blanche was the voice of hardline white opposition to the end of minority rule, but has had a low public profile since his release in 2004 from prison after serving a sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.