6 S. Africa Executions Are Delayed by Judge

The execution of six South African blacks, who were due to be hanged at dawn today for the murder of a black local official during anti-apartheid riots here four years ago, was postponed Thursday after worldwide pleas for clemency.

The original trial judge, Justice W. J. Human, when told that a key prosecution witness had admitted that he had lied, ordered the one-month postponement of the execution of the “Sharpeville Six,” as the condemned have become known, to permit their lawyers to present new evidence.

The surprise court ruling, coming after President Pieter W. Botha had rejected all calls for mercy, including those from President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, appeared to reduce the political tensions that had been rapidly building here and that black leaders had warned could bring a quick resurgence of violence in the country.

Only a few hours earlier, a powerful bomb exploded outside a magistrate’s court and police station at Krugersdorp, 15 miles northwest of Johannesburg, killing three people and injuring 20 others, most of them government employees but also a 15-month-old baby being carried by her mother.

Adriaan Vlok, the South African minister of law and order, said in Cape Town that the African National Congress, the principal guerrilla group fighting minority white rule here, was responsible for the explosion.

A 24-year-old white ANC member, Heinrich Grosskopf, the son of a well-known university professor and former newspaper editor, is being sought as the prime suspect in this attack and a similar car-bomb explosion last year at the Johannesburg military command headquarters, police said. Six blacks are also being sought.

Police said they later found and defused two other bombs, both small mines, that had been planted in the toilets of the court building.

In Lusaka, Zambia, where the ANC has its exile headquarters, spokesman Tom Sebina said that it was possible that the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, may have set off the bomb to protest the scheduled executions.

Convicted in 1985

The Sharpeville Six were convicted in 1985 of murdering Jacob Dlamini, deputy mayor of the black townships in the Vaal industrial region south of Johannesburg, on Sept. 3, 1984, during a protest against rent increases at the start of the civil unrest here.

Judge Human, who presided over the original trial, said that if he had known that a key prosecution witness, Joseph Monete, had told his own lawyers in a sworn statement that he had been beaten and coerced by police into identifying two of the defendants as members of that mob, he would then have allowed the defense attorney to cross-examine Monete.

The defendants themselves were overjoyed with the decision, according to one of their lawyers, Prakash Diar, who went straight from court to tell them the news on death row at Pretoria Central Prison. “They really throught this was going to be their last night on earth,” he said.

Although the government argued Thursday that there was sufficient other evidence to convict the two defendants implicated by Monete, Human said Monete’s decision to recant his testimony after three years could affect those two convictions and perhaps the others as well.

“Once a successful challenge could be made to Monete’s evidence, then it throws into question the whole investigation into the matter, as well as the evidence of the other witnesses,” Denis Kuny, the chief defense counsel, argued. “If there is a reasonable chance that Monete was influenced by the police to present perjured evidence, it casts a reflection on other evidence.”

Whether any of the six were directly involved in Dlamini’s murder--he was stoned, hacked with machetes and then doused with gasoline and set alight--remains hotly contested. Some of the defendants assert that they were bystanders, and others say they were not even present. The government declares that, according to the trial evidence, each was personally involved.

Human had ruled in convicting the six of murder--two other defendants were acquitted of murder but convicted of public violence and sentenced to eight years in prison--that as members of the mob attacking Dlamini’s house and assaulting him, they had “common cause” with those who actually killed him and thus were equally guilty under South African law.

The six condemned are Mojalefa Sefatsa, 32, a fruit vendor; Reid Mokeona, 24, unemployed; Oupa Deniso, 32, a quality control inspector at a steel plant; Duma Khumalo, 28, a college student; Theresa Ramashamole, 26, a waitress, and Francis Mokgesi, 30, a window dresser and professional soccer player.