Mandela Van Seized in Murder Inquiry : Bodyguards Allegedly Abducted, Beat S. African Teen-Ager

Authorities opened a murder investigation Wednesday into the stabbing death of a teen-ager allegedly abducted by bodyguards of black activist Winnie Mandela. South African plainclothes officers stopped a van carrying Mandela and impounded it as part of the investigation.

The murder case was formally opened when policemen, using fingerprints, identified a body found last month in a field near the Mandela home in Soweto as that of Stompie Mokhetsi Seipie, a 14-year-old black activist. An autopsy revealed that Seipie had been beaten and that he died as the result of two slashes on his neck.

Seipie was one of four young men the police say were abducted Dec. 29 from a Methodist church house in Soweto by members of the Mandela United soccer club, which provides security for the wife of jailed black nationalist leader Nelson R. Mandela.

Church officials say the four were held at the Mandela home, where members of the soccer club also stay, and beaten. One escaped and two others were released last month, but Seipie disappeared.

According to their attorney, the men say Winnie Mandela was “involved in the events” on the night they were abducted. But the attorney has declined to elaborate.

Mandela and her daughter, Zinzi, flew to Cape Town for an 80-minute visit Wednesday with her husband on the grounds of a prison farm near Paarl, where he is serving a life sentence for sabotage. On her return to Johannesburg, she declined to comment.

But as she was being driven home by a member of Mandela United, the van was pulled over by police officers. Her driver was detained briefly and questioned, and the van was taken away by the policemen. Mandela and her daughter were given a lift by a passing journalist.

Reputation Diminished

Winnie Mandela, 54, has long battled the white minority-led government, becoming one of the anti-apartheid movement’s leading campaigners. But in recent years her reputation as “mother of the nation” has diminished among South Africa’s black majority.

Exiled members of her husband’s African National Congress, civic leaders and even Mandela himself have urged her to disband Mandela United, a group of several dozen young men with a reputation for thuggery in Soweto, the sprawling black township near Johannesburg.

But she has refused, and in increasingly bitter conversations with anti-apartheid leaders in recent weeks, she has threatened to resign from the ANC and denounce her detractors. She has insisted that the soccer club took the four men from the church home of Paul Verryn, a white pastor, to protect them from sexual abuse. Church officials deny the allegation.

Probe of Death

Police are also investigating the death last week of Maxwell Madondo, 19, who had been staying at the Mandela house and may have been a member of the soccer club. The Star, a newspaper in Johannesburg, quoted an unidentified witness as saying Madondo was killed by a gang of youths armed with pick handles.

The South African Council of Churches appealed Wednesday for calm among Soweto’s 2.2 million people.

“Being aware of the explosive situation, and the potential loss of lives, the SACC calls upon the community and all parties involved in this conflict to exercise extreme humanness and restraint in the present situation,” the Rev. Frank Chikane, the council’s general secretary, said.