White farmer found guilty of throwing black worker to lions in South Africa
Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian
A white South African farmer and one of his black labourers were found guilty yesterday of murdering a black former employee and throwing him to a pride of lions.
Mark Scott-Crossley and Simon Mathebula, who both pleaded not guilty and blamed each other for the murder, tied up Nelson Chisale, beat him with machetes and dumped him in an enclosure for rare white lions in northern Limpopo province.
Investigators found little more than a skull, a few bones and a finger. The pair will be sentenced at a later date. South Africa has been gripped with morbid fascination by the case, which has inflamed black anger against white farmers in a country still coming to terms with its apartheid past.
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The victim was tied to a tree and beaten by the workers, and, witnesses told the court, the farmer. All sides agree that Scott-Crossley and Mathebula loaded Chisale into a truck and drove him some 12 miles to the Mokwalo White Lion Project, where they threw his body over a fence into an enclosure holding five white lions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,13262,1472980,00.html