Word: inquestion
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...lawyer was Sydney Woolf Kentridge, one of South Africa's most able trial attorneys; the witness was Colonel Pieter Johannes Goosen, the officer in charge of security police at Port Elizabeth. Their angry exchange in Pretoria last week provided the dramatic high point of an extraordinary public inquest into the death of Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko...
...assigned to a galleried courtroom in a former synagogue converted to judicial use several years ago. There each morning Biko's widow Ntsiki and other relatives, still dressed in deep mourning, assembled silently in the front row. Some 250 other spectators packed the remaining seats. Presiding over the inquest was Chief Pretoria Magistrate Martinus Prins. But the man who dazzled the courtroom was Kentridge, 55, a defense veteran of some of South Africa's landmark political trials over the past two decades, whose services were secured by Biko's family...
...most gripping, the inquest took on the aura of a political trial. An excerpt from another duel between Kentridge and Goosen...
...unrest. In June 1976, student-inspired riots broke out in the sprawling black suburb of Soweto, outside Johannesburg; urban black unrest has continued sporadically across the country ever since, taking more than 600 lives. Two months ago, a young black leader, Stephen Biko, 30, died mysteriously in prison. An inquest is still pending, but there is widespread suspicion that prison beating contributed to his death. The Biko case produced further disorder, and on Oct. 19 the government responded by arresting or "banning"?a unique form of near-solitary confinement which can include house arrest?some 60 individuals, 18 organizations...
...Soweto riots began 17 months ago. It has been further fanned by the death in September of the imprisoned black political leader Stephen Biko. An autopsy, still to be released, reportedly finds that Biko's death was caused by "extensive head injury of unknown origin," and an inquest begun two weeks ago and postponed will continue Nov. 14. The South African crackdown on political dissenters was the final straw...