(AFP) — South Africa’s ambassador to France, formerly a long-serving cabinet minister, was found dead on Tuesday at a Paris hotel in what is being treated as a possible suicide, the Paris prosecutor said.
The body of Nkosinathi Emmanuel Nathi Mthethwa, 58, a close associate of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma, was found in the interior courtyard of the upscale Hyatt hotel.
The ambassador, usually known as Nathi Mthethwa, had reserved a room on the 22nd floor and its secured window had been forced open with a pair of scissors that were found at the scene.
His wife saw him a final time on Monday afternoon when he was supposed to go to a cocktail event, and then received a message in the evening “in which he apologised to her and expressed his intention to end his life”, prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
“Initial investigations suggest that this could have been a deliberate act, without the intervention of a third party,” she said, while emphasising the investigation would seek to collect all the details.
Mthethwa had been ambassador since December 2023.
ORKNEY, SOUTH AFRICA SEPTEMBER 24 (SOUTH AFRICA OUT):Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa and Acting President Cyril Ramaphosa during Heritage Day celebrations at James Motlatsi Stadium on September 24, 2014 in Orkney, South Africa. (Photo by Deaan Vivier/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images)
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called his death “untimely” and “a moment of deep grief in which government and citizens stand beside the Mthethwa family”.
“Ambassador Mthethwa has served our nation in diverse capacities during a lifetime that has ended prematurely and traumatically,” he said.
The circumstances of “his untimely death” are under investigation by the French authorities, a South African ministerial statement confirmed.
Mthethwa served as South Africa’s culture minister from 2014 to 2019, and then minister for sports, arts and culture until 2023, according to his embassy website.
He was also police minister from 2009 to 2014 and security minister from 2008 to 2009.
Mthethwa also served on the board of directors of the 2010 Football World Cup local organising committee.
Between 2007 and 2022, he was a senior official in the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party since the first post-apartheid democratic elections in 1994.
He worked underground within the ANC’s military wing during apartheid and was notably arrested during the state of emergency in 1989.
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