Biden recants about about being arrested in South Africa

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden acknowledged Friday that he was not arrested when trying to see Nelson Mandela during a South Africa trip in the 1970s.

"I wasn't arrested,” Biden, a former vice president, told CNN. “I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go.”

Biden had in recent weeks said on the campaign trail, ahead of this weekend’s primary in South Carolina, where nearly 30 percent of the population is African-American, that he was arrested on the trip. 

His campaign in recent days has walked back Biden’s story after it couldn’t be verified -- saying he was in fact temporarily separated from the delegation going to see Mandela -- the late South African political leader and peace activist.  

Biden said two weeks ago while campaigning in South Carolina: “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to see him on Robbens Island.” 

However, Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the purported arrest, has refuted Biden’s claim that they were arrested together in South Africa.

In addition, fact-checkers could not find any news reports or official reports of the arrest, when Biden at the time was a senator. And Biden made no mention in his 2007 memoir of the incident.

On Friday, Biden said he separated from the delegation at an airport.

"They had me get off a plane -- the Afrikaners got on in the short pants and their guns. Lead me off first and moved me in a direction totally different,” he also told CNN. “I turned around and everybody, the entire black delegation, was going another way. I said, 'I'm not going to go in that door that says white only. I'm going with them.' They said, 'You're not, you can't move, you can't go with them.' And they kept me there until finally I decided that it was clear I wasn't going to move."