Amy Biehl’s Killers Go on Hunger Strike : Protest: The three South African men convicted of murdering the Newport Beach scholar and sentenced to 18 years in prison are demanding political amnesty.

The three young men convicted of murdering scholar Amy Biehl of Newport Beach have embarked on a hunger strike to demand political amnesty, state radio said Tuesday.

Mongezi Manqina, 22, Mzikhona Nofemela, 19, and Vusumzi Ntamo, 23, were each sentenced Oct. 26 to 18 years in prison. Judge Gerald Friedman said they killed Biehl simply because she was white.

SABC radio said Tuesday that the three black men--all members of the militant Pan Africanist Congress, who are being held in prisons near Cape Town--were demanding that their crime be seen as political.

Biehl’s mother, Linda, said from her Newport Beach home Tuesday that she does not support amnesty for her daughter’s killers because she does not believe the crime was politically motivated.

“When I saw the three accused, I saw the one particularly that thrust the knife up to the hilt in Amy’s heart, and he had no remorse. He looked at us with pride: ‘I did this.’ It was not a political crime,” Linda Biehl said.

“They didn’t know Amy as a politician. They didn’t even know who she was. In Amy’s case, it was just, ‘Hey, let’s get her; she’s white.’ ”

A 26-year-old Fulbright scholar, Biehl was in South Africa helping to educate voters. She was set upon by a mob chanting anti-white slogans on Aug. 25, 1993, when she drove black friends home to the impoverished Guguletu township outside Cape Town. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death.

“They’re trying to get attention . . . and working through this,” Linda Biehl said of her daughter’s killers.

If the three men can demonstrate that their crime was politically motivated, admit their guilt and give a full account of their actions, they could qualify for amnesty under a bill now before the South African Parliament.

Biehl’s mother said when she visited the townships, residents said they shared her belief that her daughter’s murder was not politically motivated.

“Most people we talked to in the townships are not political people; they are just normal people who do not view it as a political crime,” Linda Biehl said. “These people just saw it as a murder. (The attackers) were considered by a lot of people as just sort of hooligans. They were not really respected citizens in the township. The people in these townships want to see these guys punished. They want law and order.

“Obviously, they were raised in a system, in a society, where they are termed by most sociologists as the lost generation, but there needs to be some kind of justice system. They cannot just commit lawless acts under the guise of political acts,” she said.

Biehl said that although she had been aware that the men could seek amnesty, the news was another blow to the grieving family. “Isn’t it amazing? I thought we were almost through with it,” she said.

The family traveled to South Africa after their daughter’s murder, and Biehl said she was given a copy of the amnesty bill during a visit with the country’s minister of justice.

A fourth defendant, a juvenile, still awaits trial in South Africa.

Times staff writer Debbie Kong contributed to this report.