At least 8 deaths after shooting in South Africa

Eight people in a small house in a South African community were found to be dead, the police said on Saturday, the youngest such mass shootings in a country that fought against a wave of gun power and gang lawn wars.

Six men and two women between the ages of 22 and 40 were found “in a laughter with several firing wounds”, the police said in a statement. According to reports, an unknown number of attackers had reportedly entered the house on Friday evening and opened the fire, which was killed on the inside.

It is unclear whether the victims were related. The police said they started a search and examined a possible motive.

South Africa has long recorded high violent crimes, but more recently armed men have started to aim at taverns and family meetings in the hits in the attack. Experts say that violence is often the result of lawns and reprisals between criminal networks. The police say that such shootings also highlight the role of family networks in criminal activities and the target of relatives at Rachemorde.

“These tragic incidents underline the urgent need to tackle deeply rooted family conflicts and to improve the commitment of the community to prevent such violence,” said Senzo Mchunu, Minister of Police in the country, in November during a presentation of the statistics of the quarterly crime.

In September, 18 members of a family were shot down in a rural farm in the province of Eastern Cape. Most victims were women who had gathered to prepare for a traditional ceremony, the police said. The police accused a 45-year-old man for the shootout.

In January 2023, armed men killed eight people at a birthday party in Gqeberha, a coastal city in the same province. In April of this year, armed men stormed a house and killed 10 people on a homestead outside the city of Pietermaritzburg, which is located in the east of the country. And in July 2022, at least 19 people were shot in several taverns, including in Johannesburg's Soweto Township.

On Saturday, the Prime Minister of the Province of Kwazulu-Natal, Thamsanqa Ntuli, visited the latest crime scene and, according to the South African Broadcasting Corporation and other local outlets, looked in an informal settlement in Umlaza, a municipality outside the eastern town of Durban. With a long living trunk, millions of South Africans live in crowded districts without proper flowing water, electricity or police work.

In the past few months, the South African police officers have started a campaign to act against crime. The most recent crime figures reported that from October 2024 to December 2024, 6,953 people in the country were murdered, which was a minor decline compared to the figures in this period in the previous year.