- PRETORIA, South Africa: South Africans say Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi fed them misinformation about a South African journalist whose death in the north African country weeks ago has just been confirmed.
South African foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said Friday that Libya still has not come forward with the truth. Anton Hammerl’s death was confirmed Thursday by journalists who saw him shot and killed by Qaddafi’s forces in early April. Hammerl’s colleagues, held by Libyan forces until this week, had been afraid to speak of his death until they were safely out of Libya.
Nkoana-Mashabane says South Africans had received “reassurance and misinformation.” Referring to Qaddafi, she says the assurances came “at one stage from himself, yes, to say that they are all alive and that they are well.”