A RELATIVE and three friends of the bogus sign language interpreter at the Nelson Mandela memorial service say he was among a group of people who accosted two men found with a stolen television and burned them to death in 2003.
They told The Associated Press that tyres were placed around the men's necks and set ablaze.
Unlike two other suspects who went to trial in 2006 for the killings, the four said on Monday that Thamsanqa Jantjie never did because authorities determined he wasn't mentally fit.
They say Jantjie was institutionalised and then returned to his neighbourhood on the outskirts of Soweto.
The men, including one of Jantjie's cousins, 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.
Jantjie was not at his house on Monday, and the cousin told AP Jantjie had been picked up by someone in a car on Sunday and had not returned.
Jantjie told the AP last week he has schizophrenia and hallucinated, seeing angels while gesturing incoherently just a metre from President Barack Obama and other world leaders during the Tuesday ceremony at a Soweto stadium.
Signing experts said his arm and hand movements were mere gibberish.
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