South Africa to reopen Steve Biko inquest 48 years after death in police custody | South Africa
South African prosecutors will re-open an investigation into the death of the leading Anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko, about 50 years after the police died in custody.
Biko, the founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, died in 1977 in a 30 -year -old prison cell, and died after being beaten to a coma by the police arrested about a month ago.
Death led to anger in the world, and the black majority of South Africa has become an international symbol of the struggle against the racial -based Apartheid system, which rejected its political and economic rights.
The National Prosecutor’s Authority (NPA) said in a statement on Wednesday that “the main purpose of re -opening the investigation is to put in front of the evidence that will enable the court to make a finding.
The case will be reopened on the 48th anniversary of Biko’s death on September 12th.
In 1977, an investigation acknowledged that Biko was subjected to injuries when BİKO hit the wall and no one was tried for death.
In 1997, however, former police officers accepted the case that the activist attacked the atrocities committed by the Apartheid during the hearings by the Real and Reconciliation Commission (trc) in the case.
Trc refused to forgive officers by deciding that they were lying to their evidence and could not prove a political reason to kill Biko.
After the bulletin promotion
Biko’s story inspired Peter Gabriel’s anthem Biko, and then Richard Attenborough Cry Freedom.
The decision to reopen the investigation is the last of a number of movements to re -examine the deaths of the high -profile apartheid period. In April, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched an investigation as to whether the past Anc governments intervened in the investigation and prosecution of the apartheid period for criticism from sacrificial families.
In June, an investigation was opened to one of the most famous crimes of the time: the deaths of four men known as Cradock Four, who was stopped by security guards in a barricade in 1985 and drowned with telephone wire, stabbed and hit his death.
