S. Africa Hangings Prompt New Death Penalty Outcry

Four people, including a 22-year-old woman, were hanged in South Africa on Friday, provoking fresh calls from church and civil rights groups for an end to the death penalty.

A Justice Ministry spokesman said that the four, all convicted murderers, were sent to the gallows inside Pretoria Central Prison at dawn.

It was the first execution of a woman in more than two years in South Africa, which the London-based human rights organization Amnesty International says has the world’s third-highest official execution rate after Iran and Iraq.

Three more prisoners at Pretoria--the site of South Africa’s only gallows--have been told they will hang next week. This will bring the number of executions so far this year to 33, according to Lawyers for Human Rights.

A spokesman for the lawyers, a Pretoria-based civil rights group, said they were puzzled about the recent surge in executions at a time when a national anti-hanging lobby is gaining strength. “People are being notified of their executions at an unprecedented rate. It is a tragic trend,” he said.

“But support for our work is gaining all the time. We hope to succeed soon in convincing the government that capital punishment is barbaric.” he added.

Apart from the first two months of this year, when there were only two hangings, the execution rate for 1989 is now close to the average of 10 a month that has been maintained for most of the decade, according to the lawyers group.

Meanwhile, a bomb damaged the home of a top South African Indian politician Friday morning as his three sons and 80-year-old mother slept inside, but no one was injured.

Boetie Abrahamjee, chairman of the Indian house of delegates in South Africa’s segregated three-chamber Parliament, was visiting Britain at the time of the explosion.

Police said the explosion was caused by a limpet mine planted about 20 yards from the security wall of the house in an Indian suburb outside Pretoria.

The attack on Abrahamjee’s house was the second within a month on the home of a politician. On May 7 a bomb damaged the home of a white member of Parliament in Krugersdorp.