S. Africans Protest Death of Student : Tributes: Leaders call for peace and others show anger and sorrow over Southland scholar’s stabbing. Emotional memorial service recalls woman’s efforts toward national unity.

The stabbing death this week of a popular, 26-year-old Fulbright scholar by a band of angry black youths has served to unify disparate groups of blacks and whites in a powerful way, prompting new calls for an end to street violence.

Acting President Pik Botha asked South African leaders Friday to join him in seeking peace, while leaders of the African National Congress offered their help to police in tracking down the killers of Amy Elizabeth Biehl of Newport Beach. Two teen-agers have been held in the slaying but more arrests are anticipated.

At the same time, 40 members of the black Guguletu township where Biehl was killed visited the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town to express condolences. Throughout Friday, South Africans jammed phone lines or appeared at the consulate to register their outrage over Biehl’s slaying.

“I have been through this sort of thing before, but I have never seen anything like this response,” said Kyra Eberle, a spokeswoman from the U.S. consul general’s office in Cape Town. “To sum it up, the message was: We must have peace and we must have it now.”

Biehl, who was in her auto with a bumper sticker that read “Our Land Needs Peace,” was driving three black friends home when a mob of about 100 ambushed the car and pulled her into the street. While pleading for her life, Biehl was hit in the head with a brick and stabbed.

Students at the University of the Western Cape, which Biehl had been attending for the last 10 months as a Fulbright scholar, protested her death en masse Thursday after an emotional campus memorial service that drew about 1,000 people.

At the home of Biehl’s parents in Newport Beach, relatives continued to speak out about their loss, using the opportunity to focus attention on the plight of South Africa.

Biehl often “helped people by making them greater, larger, than what they really are,” said her father, Peter Biehl. “I’d like to think that her death has made (the country) pause to think that the time has come for (it) to take action. Amy . . . stood for ideas whose time have come. It’s . . . time for South Africa to unite.”

Biehl will be cremated in Cape Town and her ashes will be returned for a memorial service in Newport Beach next week.

Violence continued to escalate in South Africa on Friday, two days after Biehl’s death. Eight people--six whites and two blacks--were wounded during a rifle attack on a double-decker bus traveling from Cape Town to Johannesburg. Five were hospitalized and three were treated at the scene, about 280 miles northeast of Cape Town.

“The sad irony of the case of Amy Biehl is that her death comes during the dawn of a new day in South Africa,” said Consul General Frik Schoombee of the South African Consulate in Beverly Hills. “It is not surprising because there are fringe elements that do not want to see democracy succeed. Amy Biehl lost her life bringing people together.”

Times staff writer Lily Dizon in Orange County and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Platte reported from Orange County and Heard reported from South Africa.