Tutu Rescues Black Informer at Funeral Riot

Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu struggled with rioters today to save the life of a black man accused of working as a police informer.

Tutu had just arrived in the black township district, where nine blacks were shot dead by South African police Tuesday.

Witnesses said Tutu and Johannesburg’s bishop suffragan, Simeon Nkoane, left a funeral service for four black people in Duduza to intervene as a crowd beat the man, aged about 30, apparently injuring him badly.

A Reuters correspondent watched as the rioters then began to drag him to his car, which they had set ablaze with a firebomb. Nkoane and Tutu struggled to protect the man and eventually dragged him to Nkoane’s car.

Nkoane drove the man, who had blood pouring from his mouth, away to a hospital as the crowd beat on the roof and windows of the car with their fists and with sticks.

There were also reports of scuffling between mourners and police armed with bullwhips.

Three-Man Delegation

Tutu was one of a three-man delegation sent urgently from an Anglican Church synod in Natal to Duduza and nearby Kwathema, where the death toll of blacks killed in clashes with police rose to nine with the recovery of two more bodies. Seven blacks had been reported killed Tuesday, with police accounts of the deaths differing sharply from those of local residents. (Story, Page 4.)

“We are in a very desperate situation. . . . Violence is escalating to the point where quite a lot of young people have become almost reckless. They are saying the only way we can get the freedom we want is by fighting for it,” Tutu told reporters.

Tutu, dressed in purple bishop’s robes, attended the funeral in the dusty township sports field of four blacks who died last month when grenades they were holding exploded.