CAPE TOWN - South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said yesterday it had been told that black consciousness leader Steve Biko had been poisoned and not beaten to death as widely believed.
"We've received a document making this claim and we are investigating it," the commission's chief investigator Mr Dumisa Ntsebezi said in a statement, without elaborating on who had provided the information.
The commission said last week that five former security policemen had admitted to having killed Biko during interrogation in 1977.
An inquest at the time of Biko's death found he had died of brain damage and pathologists testified that he had suffered blows to the head.
Newspapers yesterday quoted unnamed commission sources as saying they had found security force documents showing that during the apartheid years army scientists had experimented with poisons that produced brain bleeding.
Such bleeding could make it appear the victim had suffered a blow to the head, the sources said.