JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Unidentified gunmen killed a human rights activist and university lecturer outside his suburban home Monday in one of the first assassinations of a white South African actively involved in the anti-apartheid campaign.
David J. Webster, 44, a social anthropologist at Johannesburg's University of the Witswatersrand, was shot in the back from a passing car as he unloaded his van after a trip to a garden center and bakery with companion Maggie Friedman.
'I've been shot with a shotgun, get an ambulance,' Friedman quoted Webster saying moments before he collapsed on the pavement outside his suburban Troyville home.
In a statement issued through the independent Human Rights Commission, Friedman said the killing was a 'highly professional job and I find it frightening that those who opposed him were prepared to go to such lengths to eliminate someone who was not a very prominent leader.'
A white South African born in Zambia, Webster was a founding member of the human rights group Five Freedoms Forum and active in the Detainees Parents Support Committee before its restriction last year under a 35-month-old state of emergency.
Webster's main involvement in the campaign against white minority rule in recent years was in helping political activists detained without charge under emergency rule and their families.
'I think we can say it's an asssassination. It was obviously premeditated. The car came by and he was shot in the back,' said Audrey Coleman, a member of the Detainees Aid Center, a support group created following the crackdown on the Detainees Parents group.
It was not known how many people were in the car, she said.
Police confirmed the killing and said it was under investigation. State-run television broadcast telephone numbers of the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad for anyone with information about Webster's death.
Coleman said no threats had been made previously against Webster.
The killing recalled the assassination in 1977 of another white academic involved in the anti-apartheid campaign, Rick Turner, whose murder was never solved.
'Though assassinations of political figures are common in the black community, this action is one of the first among white people working against apartheid,' the Five Freedoms Forum said in a statement.
'We feel assassinations are a further sympton of the cancer that feeds on this country. Our country's problems cannot be solved by violence,' it said.
The Five Freedoms Forum is one of several organizations involved in a recently launched campaign to open Johannesburg's segregated neighborhoods to all races.
The nation's leading legal anti-apartheid organizations, the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, denounced the killing in a statement issued through the 'Mass Democratic Movement.'
'We are deeply shocked and angered by this blatant assassination of our dear comrade,' UDF acting general secretary Mohammed Valli Moosa said in the statement.
'We are convinced that his death comes as a result of unflinching opposition to the system of apartheid. The only beneficiaries of his death are those who have an interest in perpetuating this evil system,' he said.
