Johannesburg ? South Africa’s white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers Saturday in an apparent dispute over wages, police said, amid growing racial tensions in the once white-led country.

Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the 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.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party blamed increasing racial tensions for the killing.

“This happened in a province where racial tension in the rural farming community is increasingly being fueled by irresponsible racist utterances” by two members of the governing African National Council, said the Democratic Alliance legislator for that constituency, Juanita Terblanche.

Terblanche, no relative of the far-right leader, said her party did not share his political convictions but warned that the attack on him could be seen as an attack on the diverse components of South Africa’s democracy.