charges that Thamsanqa Jantjie, the fake sign
language interpreter at Nelson Mandela's
funeral sevice faced a decade ago.
From NYPost.com
The bogus sign language interpreter at
last week's Nelson Mandela memorial
service was among a group of people
who accosted two men found with a
stolen television and burned them to
death by setting fire to tires placed
around their necks, one of the
interpreter's cousins and three of his
friends told The Associated Press
Monday.
But Thamsanqa Jantjie never went to
trial for the 2003 killings when other
suspects did in 2006 because authorities
determined he was not mentally fit to
stand trial, said the four. They insisted
on speaking anonymously because of the
sensitivity of the fake signing fiasco,
which has deeply embarrassed South
Africa's government and prompted a
high-level investigation into how it
happened.
Their account of the killings matched a
description of the crime and the outcome for
Jantjie that he himself described in an
interview published on Sunday by the Sunday
Times newspaper of Johannesburg.
"It was a community thing, what you call mob
justice, and I was also there," Jantjie told the
newspaper.
Jantjie was not at his house Monday, and the
cousin told AP Jantjie had been picked up by
someone in a car Sunday and had not
returned. His cellphone rang through to an
automatic message saying Jantjie was not
reachable.
Instead of standing trial, Jantjie was
institutionalized for a period of longer than a
year, the four said, and then returned to live
in his poor township neighborhood on the
outskirts of Soweto. At some point after that,
they said, he started getting jobs doing sign
language interpretation at events for the
governing African National Congress Party.
Jantjie told the AP last week he has
schizophrenia and hallucinated, seeing angels
while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet away
from President Barack Obama and other
world leaders during the Tuesday ceremony at
a Soweto stadium. Signing experts said his
arm and hand movements were mere
gibberish.
In the interview last Thursday, Jantjie said he
had been violent in the past "a lot" but
declined to provide more details and blamed
his violence on his schizophrenia, for which
he said he was institutionalized for 19 months
in a period that included time during 2006.
The cousin and the three friends said the
"necklacing" killing of the suspected thieves
occurred within a few hundred meters (yards)
from Jantjie's tidy concrete home near
ramshackle dwellings.
The four spoke to the AP on Monday in
Jantjie's neighborhood, and one of the friends
described himself as Jantjie's best friend.
Necklacing was a method of killing that was
fairly common during the struggle against
apartheid by blacks on blacks suspected of
aiding the white government or belonging to
opposing factions. The method was also used
in tribal disputes in the 1980s and 1990s.
While people who encounter suspect thieves
in South Africa have been known to beat or
kill them to mete out punishment, necklacing
them has been rare.
An investigation is under way by South
African officials to determine who hired
Jantjie as the onstage interpreter at the
Mandela memorial service and if and how he
received security clearance. The officials have
not said how long their investigation will take
place, and reaching them for updates was
difficult Monday, a public holiday in South
Africa.
Four government departments involved in
organizing the historic memorial service have
distanced themselves from the hiring of
Jantjie, telling the AP they had no contact
with him. A fifth government agency, the
Department of Public Works, declined to
comment and referred all inquiries about
Jantjie to the office of South Africa's top
government spokeswoman, who has only said
a "comprehensive report" will eventually be
released.
Jantjie told the AP he was hired for the event
by an interpretation company that has used
him on a freelance basis for years, but
government officials have said the owners of
the company have disappeared. The address
that Jantjie provided for the company was
occupied by a different company that is not
involved in interpreting for the deaf.
The AP was unable to verify the existence of
the school where Jantjie said he studied
signing for a year. An online search for the
school, which Jantjie said was called Komani
and located in Eastern Cape Province, turned
up nothing. Advocates for the deaf said they
have never heard of the school and said there
are no known sign language institutes in the
province.
The Star newspaper of Johannesburg reported
Friday that Jantjie said he studied sign
language interpretation in Britain at the
"University of Tecturers." A British charity
that awards qualifications for deaf and deaf-
blind communications techniques said it had
never heard of the university.
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