Protests Erupt; S. Africa Denies It Is to Blame : Official of ANC Shot to Death in Paris

An official of the African National Congress was shot and killed Tuesday as she entered her Paris office, and the incident quickly set off anti-South Africa demonstrations in the city.

South African Foreign Minister Roloef (Pik) Botha, in a statement issued through his government’s embassy in Paris, said that South Africa was not responsible for the killing, but his denial did not quiet the accusations that South African agents had fired the bullets.

Dulcie September, 45, the ANC representative for France, Belgium and Luxembourg, was shot five times with a .22-caliber rifle as she opened the door of her fourth-floor office in a dilapidated building near the Gare du Nord railroad station in central Paris. A worker from a nearby office found the body soon afterward.

Associates said that September had received death threats and reported them but that the French police had refused to protect her.

Maurice Cukierman, the ANC treasurer in Paris, said, “For the past eight months she has been telling the police, but nothing was done.” Police sources confirmed that September had reported the threats, but they had no other comment on Cukierman’s accusation.

Premier Jacques Chirac, visiting the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean as part of his campaign for the French presidency, said he was “shocked and scandalized” by the killing.

Botha declared that “the South African government cannot be held responsible for this deed,” and he tried to put the blame on anti-apartheid leaders.

“While details concerning the assassination are not yet known,” Botha said, “the government must stress that serious quarrels exist within organizations which use violence to attain their political objectives.”

Recent S. Africa Offensive

Still, suspicion fell on the South African government, which has outlawed the ANC as subversive and Communist and has mounted a recent offensive against it. Since Friday, the South African army has killed 11 people it described as ANC terrorists, including three women and a man shot Monday in a raid across the border in Botswana. A day earlier, police in Brussels defused a bomb outside the ANC office there.

French politicians and civil rights leaders were quick to react angrily against South Africa. Lionel Jospin, first secretary of the French Socialist Party, led a protest demonstration outside the South African Embassy on the Left Bank of the Seine River. The Communist-led General Confederation of Labor demonstrated at the Gare du Nord.

Georges Marchais, leader of the French Communist Party, and Andre Lajoinie, the Communist candidate for president, rushed to the scene of the shooting and denounced the French government for failing to stop the killers from entering French territory. Harlem Desir, leader of the popular French organization SOS-Racisme, demanded a break in diplomatic relations with Pretoria.

“It is unbelievable,” he said, “that the Western governments, including France, continue to hold normal relations with this criminal regime.”

September, who was termed “colored,” or mixed race, in South Africa, had worked in France for four years after serving as administrative secretary at the ANC’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

In Lusaka, Tom Sebina, the ANC spokesman, called on governments to clamp down on South African agents acting on their territory.

“Evidence before us suggests this is coming from the South African dirty tricks department as part of a terror campaign against the ANC,” he said.