MTHETHWA DID NOT FEAR MADLANGA, SAYS FAMILY

Relative dismisses suicide narrative after South African ambassador's death in Paris

- WILLEM PHUNGULA and AFP

WHILE French prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed that Nathi Mthethwa had expressed his intention to end his life, the family of the South African Ambassador to France has rejected claims suggesting that he committed suicide.

Mthethwa had reserved a room on the 22nd floor of a Paris hotel and its secured window had been forced open with a pair of scissors that were found at the scene.

His widow Philisiwe Buthelezi last saw him on Monday afternoon when he was supposed to go to a cocktail event, and then received a message in the evening "in which he apologised to her and expressed his intention to end his life", Beccuau said in a statement.

"Initial investigations suggest that this could have been a deliberate act, without the intervention of a third party," she said, while emphasising the investigation would seek to collect all the details.

However, Mthethwa’s family in KwaZulu-Natal maintained that the 58-year-old had endured torture at the hands of the Apartheid police machinery and would never take his own life to avoid accountability for his alleged interference in the work of the police as revealed in the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry.