JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Soldiers of South Africa's nominally independent black tribal territory of Ciskei shot and killed the second of two alleged coup plotters Monday while the wounded man was at a medical clinic, the South African Broadcasting Corp. reported.
The first of the alleged plotters, both former senior security force officers in the southern Ciskei territory, was shot and killed Sunday morning.
Units of the Ciskei Defense Force intercepted the men at a roadblock outside the territory's capital of Bisho Sunday at about 3:30 a.m., fatally shooting Army Col. Mangwane Guzana, a former confidante of Ciskei military ruler Brig. Oupa Gqozo, and seriously wounding one-time Security Police Chief Lt. Gen. Charles Sebe.
Sebe escaped in the bullet-riddled vehicle and was shot dead at a medical clinic near the town of Stutterheim early Monday, the SABC reported. The circumstances of his death were not reported.
Ciskei authorities confirmed Sebe's death, but not its location. But Gqozo, calling Sebe 'public enemy number one,' had vowed Sunday that he would be 'shot on sight ... when he is found.'
Gqozo had said Ciskei had 'total proof' the men were planning to overthrow the territory.
Guzana was charged with treason in Ciskei last year and fled to the neighboring black homeland of Transkei before apparently returning to try to oust Gqozo.
Sebe escaped from a Ciskei prison in 1986 after being jailed in 1983 for plotting against the homeland and, according to Ciskei sources, had returned for several months last year. But he left again in mid-1990 and his whereabouts since then were uncertain.
The alleged coup attempt followed a series of successful and abortive coups in South Africa's four nominally independent tribal homelands. Three have come under military rule and all have reported ongoing coup attempts.
Gqozo himself took power in a bloodless coup in March 1990 when he ousted self-appointed President-for-Life Lennox Sebe, the brother of Charles Sebe and the architect of Lt. Gen. Sebe's imprisonment.
Sebe had ruled over the approximately 900,000 Ciskeians since the territory accepted a limited form of independence from Pretoria in 1981, in terms of South Africa's so-called grand apartheid policy designed to segregate tribes as well as races.
The policy was implemented in 1976 with the independence of Transkei and has stripped more than one quarter of South Africa's 25 million blacks of their citizenship in a bid to keep blacks as migrant workers in the country's cities.
South Africa is the only country to recognize the independent status of the territories, but President Frederik de Klerk has conceded that his racial reforms will have to address the territories' possible reincorporation into the country.
