A top aide to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi was arrested Thursday and accused of participating in a 1987 massacre, one of the bloodiest in the ANC-Inkatha war.

A judge released M.Z. Khumalo, Inkatha’s deputy secretary general, on $2,700 bail and ordered him to surrender his passport. Two police officers also accused of taking part in the massacre were arrested earlier.

The former KwaZulu black homeland and Natal Province, merged into one province after South Africa’s first all-race elections last year, have been plagued by fierce fighting between the African National Congress and Zulu nationalist Inkatha.

Police said Khumalo, Brig. John More and Col. Louis Botha were implicated in the Jan. 21, 1987 massacre in a village south of Durban.

Thirteen people, mostly children, were killed when gunmen fired automatic rifles into the home of the father of Victor Ntuli, an activist with the United Democratic Front, the legal arm of the then-banned ANC.

Only one person escaped unhurt, a 10-year-old boy who hid in a closet. Ntuli was not at home, but was shot to death three years later.

Inkatha spokesman Ed Tillett said police “singled out (Inkatha) as part of a carefully orchestrated plan to nurture a politically correct view of violence in this province and the rest of South Africa,” the South African Press Association said.

Khumalo has also been implicated in an Inkatha scandal in 1991, when it was revealed the party accepted money from the white-minority government, and resigned as Buthelezi’s personal assistant.