JOHANNESBURG: A white South African whose murder conviction for feeding a former black employee to lions was overturned last year is to be released on Thursday on parole, his lawyer said.

"After serving two thirds of his sentence, Mark Scott-Crossley will be a free man by lunch time tomorrow," Charl van Tonder told AFP on Wednesday.

Scott-Crossley, a farm owner from northern Limpopo province, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 for beating Nelson Chisale and throwing him into a lion enclosure the previous year.

Co-accused Simon Mathebula is serving 15 years in jail for the murder.

Last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal reduced Scott-Crossley's sentence to five years after it found that the High Court had failed to prove that Chisale was alive when he was thrown to the lions.

Scott-Crossley's murder conviction was set aside for a lesser charge of being an accessory, after the fact, to murder.

The gruesome case grabbed headlines for months and re-opened racial wounds caused by the country's discriminatory white rule which ended in 1994.

The media dubbed Scott-Crossley the "lion killer" with only Chisale's skull, his finger, pieces of leg and his bloodied clothes recovered.

A third accused died before his trial was completed.

"On Friday morning we are meeting with the parole officer to discuss his parole conditions. He is very happy about going home," said Van Tonder.