Cape Town: Three shooters killed at least 11 people, including a woman who was believed to be pregnant, in an attack at a house party in South Africa, police said Wednesday.
Three others were wounded in the mass shooting late Tuesday night in KwaMakhutha township around 30 kilometres south of the city of Durban on the east coast.
The people had gathered at the house for a party when the suspects entered the house and opened fire, police said. Ten people, including the pregnant woman, died at the scene and an 11th was declared dead at the hospital.
Authorities did not immediately give out details on the condition of the three people who were wounded.
Police said they were searching for the attackers and no arrests had been made.
The motive for the shooting was not known, police said, but added that some of the people at the house were known to police as part of investigations into criminal activity. Police said they couldn’t give out any more information on those investigations.
“Although the motive of the shooting cannot be confirmed yet, a feud between rival groupings cannot be ruled out,” police said.
Thami Ntuli, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, told reporters at the scene that the killings were “really disturbing.” He said that there were known problems with drug dealing and illegal firearms in the community.
It’s the latest in a series of mass shootings in South Africa in recent years, including one in June when multiple shooters killed 12 people in a poor neighbourhood in Johannesburg. Two mass shootings two weeks apart in December killed 21 people.
South Africa has extremely high rates of violent crime, with official police statistics recording 5,427 homicides in the latest three-month period between April and June at an average of nearly 60 homicides a day.
Shootings are the most common form of homicide in South Africa, and police and crime experts have long said that one of the biggest problems is that there is a high number of illegal firearms in circulation.
The bodies of some of the victims of Tuesday night’s shooting were laid out on the ground and covered with white sheets outside the small house where the shooting took place. Police cordoned off the larger neighbourhood with yellow tape while forensic investigators worked through the scene.
Police were also investigating if the torching of a car near the house was connected to the shooting.
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