Kilometres away, Violet Dlamini sat disconsolately in a cinderblock shack, two candles burning in memory of her dead 6-month-old daughter, Angelina.``I feel what has happened to me should not happen to anyone, Black or White,'' said Dlamini, her face taut with grief.

Angelina's 11-year-old cousin, Francina Dlamini, had been carrying Angelina, in a blanket wrapped snugly against her back, across a grassy field on April 11. A White man who owned the land allegedly shouted at them to stop, then opened fire.

One bullet went through the baby's head and plowed into Francina's back. An 11-year-old boy walking with them was not harmed.

Nicholas Steyn, 42, reportedly told authorities he shot in the children's direction because they weretrespassing, a scant hundred yards from the shack where the baby lived.

Many Blacks say such killings by Whites in rural areas were not uncommon in the apartheid era, and those killers routinely went unpunished.

Apartheid ended with the nation's first all-race elections in 1994.

The recent shooting has become explosive due to the unprecedented attention it has received from President Nelson Mandela and other top leaders, the callousness of the shooting and the fact that police didn't bother to arrest Steyn for two days.