A TOP South African court announced today that it will reopen an investigation into the death of a leading anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1960s.

The original 1967 inquest ruled Chief Albert Luthuli was accidentally killed when he was struck by a train as he walked on a railway line, and died from a fractured skull.

The circumstances of his death have long been disputed  by activists and his family.

Campaigners suspect the apartheid regime was behind the death and covered it up.

At the time of his death Chief Luthuli was leader of the African National Congress (ANC) and had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 for his campaign against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime.

The National Prosecuting Authority has said it “will be presenting evidence before the court in an attempt to have the initial findings into the death of Chief Luthuli overturned.”

Chief Luthuli’s grandson, Albert Mthunzi Luthuli, said the family “welcomes the reopening of the inquest,” even though it is now years after the deaths of “many people that we suspected of being involved in my grandfather’s murder.”

He added: “We believe the Truth and Reconciliation Commission let many families of victims down by giving amnesty to apartheid murders.”

The TRC was a post-apartheid process where perpetrators of violence in were encouraged to come forward to confess to their crimes in return for immunity.

Chief Luthuli’s case is one of two inquests into the deaths of anti-apartheid activists set to be reopened.

The other concerns lawyer Mlungisi Griffiths Mxenge, who was killed after being stabbed 45 times and having his throat slit in 1981.

An inquest a year later failed to identify his murderers and it was only nine years later that Butana Almond Nofemela, part of a government covert hit squad, confessed to the killing as well as the murders of seven other ANC activists.