De Klerk's former wife found strangled

Marike de Klerk, the last of South Africa's white first ladies, has been found strangled in her Cape Town flat. The 64-year-old former wife of F W de Klerk also had a knife blade embedded in her back.

Police said she was probably killed by someone she knew as there were no signs of forced entry to the second-floor flat, on a peninsula facing Table Mountain, and nothing appeared to have been stolen. Her body was found on Tuesday but detectives believe she was killed on Monday morning.

Mr de Klerk said in a statement from Sweden he was "devastated and deeply shocked", and was in touch with their three children. The former South African president, who was a joint Nobel laureate in 1993 with Nelson Mandela, was to attend a ceremony marking 100 years of the peace prize. He said he would return home immediately.

In South Africa, black leaders issued numerous tributes to the conservative Mrs de Klerk, who strongly opposed majority rule. But rather than affection, their comments betrayed pity for the tragedy of her unhappy last few years.

President Thabo Mbeki said Mrs de Klerk, who was married to FW for 39 years until 1998, was "strong, charming and dignified". Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who also lost her husband at the end of apartheid, identified with De Klerk. "She died lonely. As a woman, I can identify with the exhaustion of her emotional resources in shaping her former husband's career. He attained his dream and she became expendable. This is the plight of so many women, irrespective of their background." In several television interviews Mrs de Klerk had begged her husband to return.

He left her on Valentine's Day 1998, to live with Elita Georgiades, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate. After Mrs de Klerk's divorce, she was engaged to a Johannesburg businessman, Johann Koekemoer. He had a nervous breakdown and the relationship ended.

Professor Deon Knobel, who led the autopsy, said: "The killer gripped her neck with such force a small blood vessel burst in her eye. Several small bones in her throat were also broken." Mrs de Klerk also had several head wounds and cuts on her arms. Professor Knobel said he found the blade of a serrated steak knife embedded in her back but it had not perforated any organs and did not cause her death.

A security guard at de Klerk's compound, a block of luxury flats in a pyramid shape at Dolphin Beach, Blaauwberg, found her in the passage leading to her main bedroom at 3pm on Tuesday. She wore pyjamas and pathologists said she had been dead for 36 hours. The alarm had been raised by Mrs de Klerk's hairdresser who had come to the flat by appointment.

Some newspaper reports said Mrs de Klerk had recently been treated in Pretoria for a broken wrist and depression. A few days ago, she is said to have told friends she was going through "a very morbid time".

Mrs De Klerk met her husband at the University of Potchefstroom while he was studying law and she was studying commerce. They were married in 1959 and had three children, Jan, Willem and Susan. When Willem had a relationship in 1989 with a mixed-race woman, Erica Adams, she barely disguised her displeasure.

She founded the Women's Outreach Foundation whose principal impact, after South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994, was to criticise the African National Congress for being soft on corruption. Her own view of women was, she said in 1991, that their role should be to "serve, heal and inspire men". Despite apparently advocating a backseat position for her gender, Mrs de Klerk appears to have been influential during her 38 years of marriage to FW. In his book on South Africa's transformation, Tomorrow Is Another Country, the veteran journalist Allister Sparks said that, in 1983, Mrs de Klerk interrupted her husband during a speech to the National Party Women's Federation, accusing him of "talking nonsense", when he suggested political rights should be extended to black people.

A police spokesman admitted: "At this stage, we have no suspects." South Africa's crime rates is high. It is one of the few countries whose citizens are more likely to be murdered than to die in a road accident. About 21,000 people were murdered last year, mostly in poor townships.