JOHANNESBURG, South Africa— "September '77, Port Elizabeth weather fine. It was business as usual, in police room 619," go the opening lines of singer Peter Gabriel's famous anti-apartheid anthem from 1980 about murdered South African activist Steve Biko.

Apartheid police always maintained that the Black Consciousness Movement leader died after accidently hitting his head against his prison cell wall. Now the South African government wants to establish what really happened in "room 619," where Biko spent almost a month in custody naked and shackled in leg irons.

On Friday, the 48th anniversary of the liberation icon's death, the government reopened the inquest into the 1977 case, in what Luxolo Tyali, a spokesman for South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said was an effort

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