Sunday Times editor Phylicia Oppelt on Monday said she stands by an article stating that comedian Trevor Noah’s cousin was murdered and buried in KwaZulu-Natal at the weekend.<\/p>\n
On Sunday night, Trevor Noah tweeted: “Thanks to some crafty journalism my family and I have spent the whole day trying to figure out which one of us died #awkward”.<\/p>\n
He later tweeted: “Don’t always believe what you read. This is something I learned from aliens when I travelled to Mars last year.”<\/p>\n
“We had several interviews with Mr Noah’s grandmother at her home in Soweto. We attended the funeral in KwaZulu-Natal at the family’s invitation,” Oppelt told News24.<\/p>\n
The newspaper reported that Cebisile Happiness Khoza disappeared a day after travelling from her home town of Msinga to Greytown, where she was preparing for a ceremony to receive her postgraduate certificate in education.<\/p>\n
Farmworkers found her burnt body in a sugar-cane field in a village near Wasbank. She had been stabbed several times.<\/p>\n
According to the article, Nomalizo Noah had been emotional on Saturday when talking about Khoza’s death. She believed the women in her family were cursed.<\/p>\n
She reportedly told the Sunday Times she received news of Khoza’s death via a phone call from a relative in Pietermaritzburg.<\/p>\n
She was quoted as saying Trevor and the murdered student had not been close as they lived in different provinces, but that they knew each other.<\/p>\n
On Monday afternoon, the 88-year-old told News24 she did not know any relatives named Khoza. <\/p>\n
She said her children, including Noah’s mother Patricia, had warned her to turn journalists away from her Soweto home.<\/p>\n
The comedian had asked his mother to ask her to stop speaking to reporters.<\/p>\n
“Tell granny not to talk to all these reporters because they are making news out of nothing,” he had told his mother, she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sunday Times editor Phylicia Oppelt on Monday said she stands by an article stating that comedian Trevor Noah’s cousin was murdered and buried in KwaZulu-Natal at the weekend. On Sunday night, Trevor Noah tweeted: “Thanks to some crafty journalism my family and I have spent the whole day trying to figure out which one of … Continue reading “Sunday Times stands by Trevor Noah murder story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[11794,34,2207,4219,40,7544],"class_list":["post-19111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-comedian","tag-crime","tag-journalism","tag-kzn","tag-murder","tag-trevor-noah"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19112,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19111\/revisions\/19112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}