White farmer found guilty of throwing black worker to lions in South Africa
A white South African farmer and one of his black labourers were found guilty yesterday of murdering a black former employee and throwing him to a pride of lions.
Mark Scott-Crossley and Simon Mathebula, who both pleaded not guilty and blamed each other for the murder, tied up Nelson Chisale, beat him with machetes and dumped him in an enclosure for rare white lions in northern Limpopo province.
Investigators found little more than a skull, a few bones and a finger
…South Africa has been gripped with morbid fascination by the case, which has inflamed black anger against white farmers in a country still coming to terms with its apartheid past.
…Much of the testimony revolved around whether Scott-Crossley, 37, ordered the killing – as his workers claimed – and whether Chisale was still alive when he was thrown to the lions.
Full: guardian.co.uk
Happy Valley heir on murder charge
The heir to one of Kenya’s biggest white-owned estates was charged yesterday with the murder of a game warden on the family’s Rift Valley farm. The Hon Thomas Cholmondeley, 37, scion of the most prominent British settler family in Kenya, pleaded not guilty to the fatal shooting of a plainclothes warden.
Police claim that Cholmondeley opened fire with a Luger pistol on a Kenya Wildlife Service warden, Simon Ole Stima, who was sitting in an unmarked car while two of his colleagues investigated a farm slaughterhouse suspected of preparing illegal game meat.
…The murdered warden was a Masai, and the case has stirred up fresh tension between white landowners and the Masai, who are campaigning to reclaim land occupied by white settlers in the colonial era.
Full: guardian.co.uk