Fake Nelson Mandela's Memorial Interpreter Helped Burn Men To Death In 2003

The bogus sign language interpreter at last week's Nelson Mandela memorial service was among a group of people who accosted two men found with a stolen television and burned them to death by setting fire to tires placed around their necks, one of the interpreter's cousins and three of his friends told a source on Monday.

But Thamsanqa Jantjie never went to trial for the 2003 killings when other suspects did in 2006 because authorities determined he was not mentally fit to stand trial, said the four.

They insisted on speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the fake signing fiasco, which has deeply embarrassed South Africa's government and prompted a high-level investigation into how it happened.

Their account of the killings matched a description of the crime and the outcome for Jantjie that he himself described in an interview published on Sunday by the Sunday Times newspaper of Johannesburg.

"It was a community thing, what you call mob justice, and I was also there," Jantjie told the newspaper.

Instead of standing trial, Jantjie was institutionalized for a period of longer than a year, the four said, and then returned to live in his poor township neighborhood on the outskirts of Soweto. At some point after that, they said, he started getting jobs doing sign language interpretation at events for the governing African National Congress Party.

Jantjie said last week that he has schizophrenia and hallucinated, seeing angels while gesturing incoherently during the Tuesday ceremony at a Soweto stadium.

In the interview last Thursday, he said he had been violent in the past "a lot" but declined to provide more details and blamed his violence on his schizophrenia.

An investigation is under way by South African officials to determine who hired Jantjie as the on-stage interpreter at the Mandela memorial service and if and how he received security clearance.