Gunmen kill 27 in two tavern attacks, police hunt eight suspects
Seventeen died at a Wedela tavern west of Johannesburg and ten at a venue in Lwandle near Cape Town, with 26 people wounded across the two scenes.
Gunmen killed 27 people and wounded 26 more in two separate tavern shootings overnight, one in Gauteng and one in the Western Cape, and police in Gauteng are searching for eight suspects.
As Deutsche Welle reported on Sunday, the first attack took place at a bar in Wedela township, west of Johannesburg, at about 9.30pm on Saturday. Police say eight unidentified armed men entered the venue, searched some of the patrons and took their cellphones before fleeing in two unidentified vehicles. Seventeen people were declared dead at the scene by emergency services and 15 others were wounded. The South African Police Service said the suspects were reportedly armed with AK-47 rifles and pistols. No motive has been established.
The second attack happened at an entertainment venue in Lwandle township near Cape Town at 1.46am. Ten people were killed and 11 were wounded. Five of the dead were declared at the scene and five died after being taken to hospital.
Both scenes are now the subject of police investigations, with the Gauteng case also a manhunt. The SAPS has not named any suspect in either attack and has not said whether the two are linked.
For South African readers, the sequence of events is likely to be familiar in its outline. Tavern shootings have accounted for some of the country’s heaviest single-incident death tolls in recent years, and mass casualty attacks in which armed men enter a crowded venue, rob patrons and open fire have become a recurring policing problem rather than an isolated one. The pattern is usually tied to either armed robbery that turns lethal, or to disputes between groups that are settled in public. Police have not yet said which applies in either case.
What distinguishes this weekend is scale rather than method. Two attacks on the same night, in two provinces, with a combined 27 dead, is the kind of caseload that stretches a provincial forensic and investigative response. Identifying and tracing eight suspects in a township setting, with no names released and vehicles described only as unidentified, is slow work that depends heavily on community cooperation.
The SAPS has asked anyone with information to come forward. In practice, the arrests in cases of this kind have historically turned on witness testimony and on camera or cellphone footage recovered from the scene, and the value of the cellphones taken from patrons in Wedela will now form part of the investigation into who was present.
The SAPS has not released the names of any of the deceased. Families of the victims in both provinces are being assisted by police victim support services, and post-mortems will form part of the investigation before any charges are brought.
Anyone with information on either attack can contact the SAPS crime stop line on 08600 10111.
Source: Deutsche Welle, Gunmen kill 27 people in two mass shootings in South Africa.
