Eight gunmen killed 17 people at a Wedela tavern. A survivor says she lay still among the dead
Gauteng police are investigating the murder of 17 people and the wounding of 15 others at a tavern in Wedela on the West Rand, where a survivor has described surviving by pretending to be dead.
Eight armed suspects opened fire on patrons at a tavern in Wedela, on the West Rand, killing 17 people and wounding 15 others, Gauteng police say. One survivor has told SABC News how she lived through it: she lay on the ground among the dead and did not move.
As SABC News reported on 27 September, the survivor recounted the attack in her own words, saying she lay there as though she were dead. The broadcaster’s report carries that account, and it is the only survivor testimony in the public record so far.
Gauteng police spokesperson Brenda Muridili said it is alleged that patrons were drinking inside and outside the tavern when the eight armed suspects arrived and opened fire on those outside. The provincial police are investigating the 17 deaths as murders.
Wedela is a small settlement in the Merafong City local municipality, the same West Rand area that includes Carletonville, a gold-mining town roughly 80km south-west of Johannesburg. It is the kind of place where a tavern on a weekend evening holds neighbours, shift workers and people who have known each other for years. That is what makes a shooting of this size land the way it does: the victims are not strangers to each other, and the survivors will keep living in the same streets as the families of the dead.
Murder is a crime under South African law, and the investigation sits with the South African Police Service. Under the Firearms Control Act, the possession and use of the weapons described in the police account is unlawful unless licensed, and firing on a crowd is a crime regardless of the weapon used.
What the police have not yet said is what motivated the attack. No arrests have been announced in the material available, and no suspect has been named. The number of wounded, 15, means a parallel load on the West Rand’s emergency and hospital services, and the investigation will run alongside those casualties for months.
For readers outside Gauteng, the detail worth holding onto is the shape of the police account: a group of armed men arriving together, firing on people gathered outside a licensed premises, and leaving. That pattern is what the investigation will have to establish or rule out, and it is the reason the case has been assigned to provincial detectives rather than left with a single station.
The Enquirer has not independently verified the survivor’s account beyond the broadcaster’s report. Police have asked anyone with information to come forward, which is the standard route in a case where the attackers arrived and left in a group and where the people who saw them are the people who were being shot at.
Source: SABC News, Carletonville tavern shooting | Survivor recounts the attack: “I lay there like I’m dead” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJpL_QquE2U)
