Police hunt gunmen after 27 killed in two mass shootings
Seventeen died at a Wedela township bar and ten at a store in Lwandle, with no arrests yet in either attack.
At least 27 people were killed in two separate mass shootings near South Africa’s two largest cities over the weekend, and police had made no arrests in either attack by Sunday.
The South African Police Service said 17 people died on Saturday night when eight suspects armed with AK-47 rifles and pistols opened fire at a bar in Wedela township, south-west of Johannesburg. At least 15 other people were wounded by gunfire in that attack.
In a separate statement, police said 10 people were killed at a store in Lwandle, near Cape Town, at around 1am on Sunday. Another 11 people were wounded. Police said they were searching for multiple suspects but did not give an exact number.
As The Guardian reported on 27 September, the two attacks came days after three gunmen opened fire at a house party near Durban, killing 11 people, among them a pregnant woman.
No arrests had been made in the two latest shootings, police said.
The weekend’s death toll makes this one of the deadliest clusters of mass shootings in recent memory, and it lands on a country that already carries some of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. What stands out here is not only the number of dead but the fact that three separate attacks in three provinces produced no arrests in the immediate aftermath. In each case the shooters arrived in a group, fired on people gathered in a public place, and left. Police have not said whether they are treating the shootings as connected.
The SAPS is the national police service responsible for investigating murder and attempted murder, and the cases will sit with its detectives in Gauteng and the Western Cape. The National Prosecuting Authority decides whether to prosecute once arrests are made. Under the Firearms Control Act, the possession of an unlicensed AK-47 is a criminal offence on its own, separate from any murder charge, and the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime is an aggravating factor at sentencing.
Wedela is a township in the Merafong City local municipality on the Far West Rand, in Gauteng, close to the gold-mining belt around Carletonville. Lwandle is near Strand in the Western Cape, in the Helderberg basin outside Cape Town. Both are working-class areas where a bar or a shop is a gathering point, and where a shooting of this kind is felt across an entire street.
For ordinary residents, the immediate consequences are the ones that follow any mass shooting here. The wounded will be treated in public hospitals in Gauteng and the Western Cape, where trauma units carry the load. Families will spend the coming days trying to identify the dead and to find out what the police know. Funerals will be arranged, and communities in both areas will be asking why the gunmen have not yet been found.
South Africa’s violent crime figures have been a standing concern for years, and the police have pointed to the proliferation of illegal firearms as a central driver. The scale of this weekend’s attacks, across three incidents and three provinces, is the kind of event that puts pressure on the SAPS to show visible progress in the first days of an investigation, when witness accounts and CCTV footage are freshest.
Police have not released the names of the dead, the identities of any suspects, or a motive in any of the three shootings. They have not said whether the attacks are linked. They have asked anyone with information to come forward.
Source: The Guardian, At least 27 dead in two mass shootings in South Africa, police say
