The commission - created by President Nelson Mandela to examine South Africa's apartheid past and grant amnesty to those who could prove their crimes had political motives - turned him down. Khundulu's crime, it found, had been motivated not by politics but by malice.

That would have been the end of it. But last month Khundulu walked free.

President Thabo Mbeki, acting on the recommendation of his political advisers, granted pardons to Khundulu and 32 other prisoners, saying the men had been jailed as a direct result of the liberation struggle. Most of the 33 were affiliated with his ruling African National Congress party, and many had, like Khundulu, seen their amnesty requests rejected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Mbeki's act of clemency ignited a firestorm and threatened to mar the work done by the truth commission up to this point. The fallout also demonstrated how raw South Africa's wounds remain eight years after Mandela was elected the nation's first black president and established the truth commission to help the nation move beyond its past.

After the pardons by Mbeki, opposition parties demanded similar treatment for their own foot soldiers. Conservative white leaders immediately cited Janus Waluz and Clive Derby-Lewis, who murdered prominent ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993. The truth commission had denied their amnesty requests. Black and white leaders alike renewed calls for a general amnesty for anyone imprisoned for committing a political crime.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace laureate who chaired the truth commission, was furious at Mbeki. He said the pardons threatened to undermine the work of the commission just as it was about to issue the final report on its six painstaking years of hearings.

"It would make a mockery of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and eviscerate the entire TRC process," Tutu told the Sunday Independent in Johannesburg.

The commission was empowered to pardon those - black or white - who fully confessed their apartheid-era crimes and could prove they had been politically motivated; it rejected 5,500 requests for amnesty while granting only 1,200 pardons. Its final report will recommend reparations for 18,000 South Africans who were victims of apartheid.

The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town also protested Mbeki's move, saying it was unfair to pardon some prisoners while most victims were still awaiting compensation.

"A pertinent question needs to be asked: Why are perpetrators who were denied amnesty apparently favored over victims still awaiting reparations?"

'No regrets'

Mbeki's government sought to play down the importance of the pardons, calling them routine.

All 33 of the men came from Eastern Cape province, whose premier, Makhenkesi Stofile, had befriended some of them while he himself was imprisoned during the late 1980s. Stofile recommended their pardons to the justice ministry.

"These guys were political prisoners," insisted Phila Ngcumba, Stofile's spokesman. "The premier has no regrets whatsoever about recommending their pardons."

In one case, a pardon was granted to a man who had killed two policemen for what the truth commission said was "personal gain." In another case, Mbeki pardoned 12 men who belonged to an ANC-affiliated group that burned four members of a rival gang to death in what the commission called a revenge killing.

"People feel the TRC was fundamentally flawed, and there needs to be a general amnesty," said Zingisa Mkhabile, the Eastern Cape chairman of the left-wing Pan Africanist Congress, five of whose members were pardoned by Mbeki. "It would definitely close a chapter in the history of this country."

Sentenced to die

But Mbeki's pardon of Khundulu seemed to arouse as much anger in some circles as it assuaged in others.

Khundulu and his chief accomplice, Nzimeni Danster, were sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of Matheus and Jeanette Palvie at their farm outside Cradock. Even by the violent standards of the times, their deaths were remarkably bloody.

Khundulu, now 43, was first convicted of burglary at the age of 15. He led a life of crime and drug use in Cradock, a cauldron of antiapartheid activity in the 1980s.

In 1987, Khundulu, Danster and two teenagers broke into the Palvies' farmhouse after being told, falsely, that its occupant was a police reservist who kept a cache of weapons.

According to court documents, they scoured the house, finding only a .22-caliber rifle. Then they waited, surprising the Palvies when they returned from shopping. They killed 63-year-old Matheus with hammers in the bathroom, and attacked Jeanette, 54, in the kitchen after she turned over the small handgun she carried in her purse.

Khundulu and Danster were arrested the next day in Lingelihle, a poor black township outside Cradock where they lived two blocks apart. They had the Palvie's two guns and household goods - clothes, linens, a camera, some tools and four cigars.

"It was a plain farm attack, an attack on two defenseless old people," said former police investigator Mark Whale, who remembers tiptoeing through the bloody Palvie house. "How could you connect it to a political act?"

According to a psychological profile prepared for his sentencing in 1989, Khundulu said he developed a deep-seated hatred of apartheid, but was never an ANC activist. A prosecutor's handwritten comment on the document notes: "Not political crime."

His death sentence was later commuted to life after the new South African government outlawed capital punishment.

In 1996, Khundulu and Danster filed a claim with the truth commission saying they had gone to the Palvie farm to look for weapons to help support the struggle.

Although their statements were inconsistent with previous evidence, the truth commission in 2000 granted the two amnesty for the killing of Matheus Palvie. But it said the attack on Jeanette Palvie was "disproportionate to the objective of stealing weapons" and refused amnesty.

The two prisoners then applied for presidential pardons. Mbeki granted Khundulu's request but refused Danster's, prompting Danster to complain publicly that the pardon process was a "scandal."

But most people in the poor black areas of the Eastern Cape, where there is a lingering sense that black rule has brought few changes, did not appear troubled by Khundulu's release.

When he arrived at his parents' concrete house last month, he was greeted by a cheering crowd of ANC youth activists. Then he disappeared.

"I was so happy to see him out of prison," said his mother, Nozamele Khundulu, 78. "I never expected to see him free while I was alive."