SOUTH AFRICA: Two plead not guilty to killing Eugene TerreBlanche

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REPORTING FROM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- Two black farm workers on Monday pleaded not guilty to killing South African white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche, who was found dead on his farm last year after being brutally beaten.

The defendants, Chris Mahlangu and a teenager whose identity is confidential under South African law, were employed by TerreBlanche as laborers.

Prosecutors allege that the killing occurred in a dispute over wages. Prosecutor George Saloyi said the pair found TerreBlanche, 69, asleep on his bed and beat him to death with a steel pipe. An autopsy indicated he sustained 28 injuries.

TerreBlanche founded a pro-apartheid paramilitary group, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, that was prominent in the 1970s and ‘80s but was a spent force by the time of his death.

The youth’s attorney, Norman Arendse, told the nation’s High Court in Ventersdorp that the boy was terrified of TerreBlanche, saying the militant abused him physically and verbally, often swearing at him. The attorney said there were also allegations that his client, who was 15 at the time, was a victim of sex abuse.

Arendse said the youth had entered TerreBlanche’s home on the day of the slaying but that the victim was already dead by then.

‘On the day in question ... the accused did enter the house of the deceased through an open window,’ Arendse told the court, according to the South African Press Assn. ‘He was able to say that the deceased had already been killed and this will explain why some blood was found on his clothes.’

He said the teen had received partial payment for his day’s work as a herdsman for TerreBlanche’s 97 cattle and had no dispute with the militant at the time of the killing.

Police Officer Klaas Nkathule testified that he received a call from a minor at dusk on April 3, 2010, the day of the killing. A boy told him that he and a friend had killed TerreBlanche because they had not been paid for a day’s work, he said.

The boy told him that they were hiding, afraid of being killed in revenge, the news agency reported.

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-- Robyn Dixon

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