Johannesburg — South African activist and anti- apartheid leader Steve Biko died almost five decades ago at the age of 30 in police custody. Family members and others who saw his body that day said he was tortured and killed by South African police, and that he had not died from the effects of a hunger strike, as officers claimed at the time.

Prosecutors announced on Friday that they would be reopening a formal inquest into Biko's death, exactly 48 years to the day after he died.

Biko, a liberation leader who founded and led South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement, became one of the most globally recognized victims of the apartheid era following his 1977 death in a prison cell.

The country's National Prosecuting Authority, in a landmark decision, confirmed it would reopen an i

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