A South African white supremacist leader was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers in an apparent wage dispute, police said, but his followers yesterday blamed a fiery youth leader for a "hate speech" which they claim led to his killing.

Eugene Terreblanche's violent death on Saturday came amid growing racial tensions in the once white-led country and underscored an ongoing contro-versy over African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema's performance last month of an apartheid-era song that advocates the killing of white farmers.

Mr Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, that wanted to create three all-white republics within South Africa in which blacks would be allowed only as guest workers.

Andre Nienaber, a member of the group and a relative of Mr Terreblanche, said he believed his death was "as a result of Mr Malema's hate speech and direct orders in the media to 'shoot the Boers dead'".

Boer means white farmers in Afrikaans, the language of descendants of early Dutch settlers, or Afrikaners.

Mr Malema is often in the news for his fiery rhetoric. Last month, he led college students in belting out a song that includes the lyrics "shoot the Boer". Mr Malema did not mention Mr Terreblanche or any other person in his performance.

The song has sparked a legal battle in which the ruling ANC party has challenged a high court which ruled the lyrics were unconstitutional. An unknown number of white farmers - possibly scores - have been killed since 1994, many of them in land disputes. Some critics blame the government's badly organised land reform programme and allege that corruption is a problem.

A leading Afrikaner lobby group, AfriForum, claimed that since Mr Malema sang the song in public, there has been a rise in killings of white farmers, with four killed in the previous week.

Relatives and friends of Mr Terreblanche gathered near his homestead this morning to pay their respects.