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South African police have launched a manhunt for suspects who stole a boxing belt donated to Nelson Mandela by US champion Sugar Ray Leonard.<\/p>\n
The world champion belt, worth about $3,000 (\u00a32,500), had been on display at the Mandela House museum in Soweto.<\/p>\n
Police spokesperson Col Dimakatso Sello told the BBC that a case of theft was opened with the police on 2 July.<\/p>\n
It is alleged that staff who reported for duty at the famous museum on Vilakazi Street, where the anti-apartheid icon lived between 1946 and 1962, noticed that the locks had been tampered with the day before.<\/p>\n
On investigation, it was established that the belt had been taken. It is unclear at this stage if anything else was stolen.<\/p>\n
Mandela, who became South Africa\u2019s first democratically elected president in 1994 after spending 27 years in jail for fighting against apartheid, was a boxing fan.<\/p>\n
“I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match,” he wrote in his autobiography.<\/p>\n
According to Mandela House, the belt was given to Mandela shortly after his release from prison by South Africa’s white-minority government in February 1990.<\/p>\n
In June of that year in New York he met US boxers who had helped in the anti-apartheid struggle, including Sugar Ray Leonard seen below to Mandela’s right:<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Featured Video\n<\/p>\n\n
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