South Africa to reopen Steve Biko inquest 48 years after death in police custody

Biko, the founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, was 30 when he died. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

South African prosecutors will reopen an inquest into the death of the prominent anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, nearly 50 years after he died in police custody.

Biko, the founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, died in a prison cell in 1977 aged just 30, after being beaten into a coma by police who had arrested him nearly a month earlier.