Three children among 11 killed after gunman opens fire at South African bar
Forensic teams and police were seen trawling the area hours after the shooting rocked the township of Saulsville (Picture: Reuters)
Gunmen have killed at least 11 people including three children in a shooting outside Pretoria, South Africa.
Another 14 people were injured following the incident in the Saulsville township at 4.15am (6.15am GMT) on Saturday, South African Police Services said in a statement.
Police are hunting for three suspects after ‘unknown gunmen’ began ‘randomly’ firing at people at a bar in the early hours of Saturday.
The children who were killed were aged three, 12 and 16. The ages of the others killed and injured are not yet known.
Police are hunting for three suspects and said the motive behind the attack remains unclear (Picture: Reuters)
Brigadier Athlenda Mathe, a police spokesperson, told national broadcaster SABC: ‘We are told that at least three unknown gunmen entered this hostel where a group of people were drinking and they started randomly shooting.’
She said the shooting had taken place at an ‘illegal shebeen’ – meaning an unlicensed bar.
Police were only alerted at 6am – nearly two hours after the shooting.
Mathe said that the motive behind the shooting was unclear and that illegal bars, often the scenes of shootings, posed a ‘serious challenge’.
She said ‘innocent people’ were getting ‘caught up in the crossfire’.
There have been several mass shootings at bars – also called taverns in South Africa – in recent years.
‘Shebeens’ – unlicensed bars – are common throughout much of South Africa and are often the scenes of extreme violence (Picture: Reuters)
In 2022, 16 people were killed in the Johannesburg township of Soweto.
Last year, 18 people were killed, 15 of them women, in mass shootings at two separate houses on the same road in a rural part of Eastern Cape province, police said.
Seven men were arrested for those shootings and face multiple charges of murder
Police recovered three AK-style assault rifles they believe were used in the shootings.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with some 63 people killed each day between April and September, according to police data.
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