SOUTH AFRICA . . . CONVICTION IN SLAYING OF AMERICAN STUDENT

Three blacks were convicted today in the racial murder of an American student last year after a long and divisive trial that garnered world-wide media attention. Amy Biehl, 26, a Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, Calif. was in South Africa working on voter education and doing research on women's rights, when she was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in August by a mob near Cape Town. The conviction concludes a trial that dragged on for months because witnesses to the murder weren't forthcoming at first. But after they testified, "there was really no doubt in anybody's mind about the verdict," says TIME Cape Town reporter Peter Hawthorne. While members of the militant Pan-African Congress, who supported the killers, are expected to stage a protest, there won't be any major riots, Hawthorne says.