Blast Hurts Mixed-Race S. Africa Official

A deputy Cabinet minister was seriously injured by a grenade hurled through his bedroom window early Wednesday in a series of three coordinated attacks on South African officials outside Cape Town.

Luwellyn T. Landers, 37, newly appointed deputy minister of population development and a Colored, or mixed-race, member of Parliament, was showered with shrapnel after the grenade exploded next to his bed as he slept about 2 a.m.

Two grenades were thrown into the home of Fred J. Peters, also a Colored member of Parliament and the national secretary of the Labor Party, a predominantly Colored organization, in another Cape Town suburb. And a grenade was fired into a police station in a black township outside Cape Town. Although damage was extensive, there were no injuries in these two attacks, according to police.

Resignations Demanded

A group calling itself the Western Cape Suicide Squad later claimed responsibility for the attacks and demanded that Colored and Indian members of South Africa’s new tricameral Parliament resign since blacks are excluded from it. However, Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, blamed guerrillas of the outlawed African National Congress and said the attacks prove they are trying to murder community leaders.

In another development in Johannesburg, black leaders charged that a group of whites has drawn up a “hit list” of 14 prominent anti-apartheid activists, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace laureate, who were to be abducted or killed by this weekend.

“We have positive information that, within hours, we are to be eliminated,” said the Rev. Frank Chikane, a leader of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 650 groups opposed to South Africa’s apartheid policies of racial segregation.

Plot Aims Detailed

Chikane, who is facing trial on treason charges for his anti-apartheid activities, said the plot was discovered earlier this week with the recruitment of 30 blacks who were to carry out an average of four kidnapings and killings a night until Sunday. The day is the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising against apartheid that left at least 575 dead; it is commemorated annually.

Chikane and other black leaders refused to disclose the source of their information or to identify the whites believed to be involved in the plot. They said they have not informed the police or asked for protection.

Those on the “hit list,” according to Chikane, besides Tutu and himself, include Patrick Lekota of the United Democratic Front; three leaders of the Azanian People’s Organization, a rival black group; the head of the Council of Unions of South Africa; a women’s group leader, and a prominent black theologian.

Tutu, the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, said he and the others were taking the threat seriously with additional security measures. “It’s like a bomb scare,” he said. “You know that most are hoaxes, but you always think that this one might be real.”

While accepting that there is “some evidence” to support the black leaders’ charges, several veteran political observers, black as well as white, suggested that the real intent of the plot may have been to intimidate the activists, particularly in advance of the anniversary of the Soweto riots, always a time of great tension here. Suspicion, these observers said, should be focused on the “dirty tricks” section of the security police rather than on the fanatical right wing.