Another Youth Charged in Murder of Amy Biehl : Crime: Three South African members of anti-white group were already convicted in death of Newport Beach woman.

Another black youth was charged with murder today in the racially motivated killing of white American student Amy Biehl.

Ntombeko Ambrose Peni, 19, was arrested in Guguletu township, near Cape Town. Bail was set at $285, and a trial was scheduled for Feb. 18.

“We have concrete evidence associating him with the actual murder,” said a police spokesman, Col. Richard Dowd. Under South African law, Dowd could not disclose any further details.

Biehl, a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, was in South Africa helping educate blacks about voting procedures before the nation’s first all-race elections, in which Nelson Mandela was elected president.

She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death by a mob chanting anti-white slogans when she drove black friends home to Guguletu on Aug. 25, 1993, only two days before she was to return home to pursue a doctorate in women’s studies at Rutgers University.

The slaying of the young white American sympathetic to the aspirations of the country’s black majority elicited shock and condemnation in South Africa and led to fears that the country was destined for a blood bath. However, the elections took place in a mostly peaceful atmosphere.

Three black youths who belonged to the militantly anti-white Pan Africanist Students’ Union were convicted of Biehl’s murder in October and sentenced to 18 years each in prison.

“We are very satisfied with the way the trial has turned out, that justice has been served,” Biehl’s father, Peter, said Friday.

“Our great hope in all of this is something beyond the trial itself. We hope that the people in the townships can one day get to a point where they can fully participate in the democracy that they worked for, that Amy worked for.”

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Peter Biehl and his wife, Linda, are planning a trip to South Africa sometime in the next two months to award grants from the Amy Biehl Fund, set up last April to commemorate what would have been Biehl’s 27th birthday and South Africa’s first free elections.

So far, the foundation has contributed thousands of dollars to anti-poverty and child-care programs in South African townships where Biehl had worked.

“We will never come to grips with Amy’s death,” he said. “But as a family, we can either choose to be victims, which Amy would never have done, or we could use our time to draw attention to Amy’s story and to this incredible movement that she worked for.”

The killing of the Stanford graduate--who originally intended to study medicine but decided to devote her life to human rights--has given her family a different outlook on life.

Her 24-year-old sister Molly has quit a lucrative job as a consultant for the Advisory Group in Washington and returned to the University of New Orleans to devote herself to urban policy and youths, Peter Biehl said.

Kimberly Biehl, 29, is a fund-raiser for the Amy Biehl Fund.

“Amy was a little dynamo, and she has inspired that in all of us,” said Peter Biehl. He added that he still misses his daughter’s Sunday morning phone calls, in which he would “listen to her rattle on about 15 to 20 minutes about the things she was doing and the progress she was making in learning the language there, with all its clicking sounds.”

“I’ll never forget those Sunday mornings,” he said.

Times staff writer Thao Hua contributed to this story.