Details have emerged about the violent crime charges
that Thamsanqa Jantjie, the fake sign language
interpreter at Nelson Mandela's funeral sevice faced
a decade ago.
From NYPost.com
The bogus sign language interpreter at last
week’s Nelson Mandela memorial service was
among a group of people who accosted two men
found with a stolen television and burned them
to death by setting fire to tires placed around
their necks, one of the interpreter’s cousins and
three of his friends told The Associated Press
Monday.
But Thamsanqa Jantjie never went to trial for
the 2003 killings when other suspects did in
2006 because authorities determined he was not
mentally fit to stand trial, said the four. They
insisted on speaking anonymously because of
the sensitivity of the fake signing fiasco, which
has deeply embarrassed South Africa’s
government and prompted a high-level
investigation into how it happened.
Their account of the killings matched a description of
the crime and the outcome for Jantjie that he himself
described in an interview published on Sunday by the
Sunday Times newspaper of Johannesburg.
“It was a community thing, what you call mob justice,
and I was also there,” Jantjie told the newspaper.
Jantjie was not at his house Monday, and the cousin
told AP Jantjie had been picked up by someone in a
car Sunday and had not returned. His cellphone rang
through to an automatic message saying Jantjie was
not reachable.
Instead of standing trial, Jantjie was institutionalized
for a period of longer than a year, the four said, and
then returned to live in his poor township
neighborhood on the outskirts of Soweto. At some
point after that, they said, he started getting jobs
doing sign language interpretation at events for the
governing African National Congress Party.
Jantjie told the AP last week he has schizophrenia and
hallucinated, seeing angels while gesturing
incoherently just 3 feet away from President Barack
Obama and other world leaders during the Tuesday
ceremony at a Soweto stadium. Signing experts said
his arm and hand movements were mere gibberish.
In the interview last Thursday, Jantjie said he had
been violent in the past “a lot” but declined to
provide more details and blamed his violence on his
schizophrenia, for which he said he was
institutionalized for 19 months in a period that
included time during 2006. The cousin and the three
friends said the “necklacing” killing of the suspected
thieves occurred within a few hundred meters (yards)
from Jantjie’s tidy concrete home near ramshackle
dwellings.
The four spoke to the AP on Monday in Jantjie’s
neighborhood, and one of the friends described
himself as Jantjie’s best friend.
Necklacing was a method of killing that was fairly
common during the struggle against apartheid by
blacks on blacks suspected of aiding the white
government or belonging to opposing factions. The
method was also used in tribal disputes in the 1980s
and 1990s. While people who encounter suspect
thieves in South Africa have been known to beat or
kill them to mete out punishment, necklacing them
has been rare.
An investigation is under way by South African
officials to determine who hired Jantjie as the onstage
interpreter at the Mandela memorial service and if
and how he received security clearance. The officials
have not said how long their investigation will take
place, and reaching them for updates was difficult
Monday, a public holiday in South Africa.
Four government departments involved in organizing
the historic memorial service have distanced
themselves from the hiring of Jantjie, telling the AP
they had no contact with him. A fifth government
agency, the Department of Public Works, declined to
comment and referred all inquiries about Jantjie to
the office of South Africa’s top government
spokeswoman, who has only said a “comprehensive
report” will eventually be released.
Jantjie told the AP he was hired for the event by an
interpretation company that has used him on a
freelance basis for years, but government officials
have said the owners of the company have
disappeared. The address that Jantjie provided for
the company was occupied by a different company
that is not involved in interpreting for the deaf.
The AP was unable to verify the existence of the
school where Jantjie said he studied signing for a
year. An online search for the school, which Jantjie
said was called Komani and located in Eastern Cape
Province, turned up nothing. Advocates for the deaf
said they have never heard of the school and said
there are no known sign language institutes in the
province.
The Star newspaper of Johannesburg reported Friday
that Jantjie said he studied sign language
interpretation in Britain at the “University of
Tecturers.” A British charity that awards qualifications
for deaf and deaf-blind communications techniques
said it had never heard of the university.
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