2 Former Lesotho Officials and Wives Abducted, Slain

Two former Cabinet ministers in the Lesotho government and their wives were abducted from a weekend dinner party and murdered, the kingdom’s police commissioner said Monday.

Vincent Makhele, Lesotho’s foreign minister until a military coup last January, and Desmond Sixishe, the former information minister, were taken to remote Bushman’s Pass in Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains and killed late Saturday, according to Maj. Gen. James Dingizwayo, the national police commissioner.

Dingizwayo said police were uncertain of the motives, but political observers in Maseru had no doubts Monday that they stemmed directly from the two men’s membership in the Cabinet of the ousted prime minister, Chief Leabua Jonathan, and from their own efforts recently to gather the new regime’s opponents in a leftist political front.

Jonathan was deposed in the January coup after 20 years in power.

Both of the slain former Cabinet ministers had backed the formation of a youth corps, trained and armed by North Korea, that was loyal to Jonathan but was becoming a second army in the country.

Were Leftist Ministers

“Even under Chief Jonathan, Sixishe and Makhele were among the most left-wing ministers and had said they wanted a Marxist government,” a former government official, himself a victim of the coup, said by telephone from the small mountainous kingdom. “Now, they were working to establish what the government could only see as some sort of Communist party . . . and that has to be dangerous in this country.”

Lesotho, an impoverished nation of 1.5 million, is surrounded by South Africa and is economically dependent on it. Jonathan, now 72, was deposed after a three-week South African blockade, which halted imports of food, fuel and other goods as well as Lesotho’s meager exports and brought the economy to a virtual standstill.

Shipments were resumed after the new military government made its peace with Pretoria, which has since signed a multibillion-dollar deal to develop local water resources for joint use.

Makhele and Sixishe were among four Cabinet ministers detained without charge three times after the coup and, along with Jonathan, were held under house arrest when they were not imprisoned.

Political activities were outlawed entirely in March, and all of the government’s executive and legislative authority has been given to King Moshoeshoe II, who in turn is responsible to the ruling military council under Maj. Gen. Justinus M. Lekhanya, commander of the 3,000-man armed forces.

Supported Guerrillas

Another possible element in the murders, political observers in Lesotho said, asking not to be quoted directly, is the strong support Sixishe and Makhele had given over the past six or seven years to the African National Congress, the principal guerrilla organization fighting white rule in South Africa.