In Johannesburg, South Africa, there was a mass shooting at a local bar in the Soweto urban area on Sunday morning.
According to the police, men armed with rifles and pistols rushed into the bar and randomly shot 15 customers to death. In addition, nine people were injured.
– We received an alert in the wee hours of the morning, around 00:30. When we arrived, 12 people were found dead, commented the inspector Elias Mawela to the media.
The injured were transported to the hospital, where three of them died.
The suspected attackers are still at large, and the police do not have an exact idea of how many there were. There is currently no information about the attackers’ motive either.
The scene was poorly lit, which is why it has been difficult for the police to get identifications of the attackers from those present.
– Large caliber firearms were used and the shooting was random. Everyone who was there tried to get out of the bar, says Mawela.
Soweto is one of South Africa’s largest townships, i.e. residential areas where black residents were concentrated during the apartheid racial segregation policy, and which is still a poor area.
Another shooting and mysterious deaths in bars
According to local media, another bar shooting in Pietermaritzburg, hundreds of kilometers from Johannesburg, took place at night in South Africa, claiming the lives of four people.
More than 20,000 people are murdered in South Africa every year, which is one of the highest murder rates in the world relative to the population.
At the end of June, South Africa was shocked by a case where 21 young people died in a nightclub in East London under unclear circumstances. The causes of their deaths have not yet been released, but according to the police, it was not a shooting or a stampede.
A gas leak in the poorly ventilated and packed bar has been considered the likely cause of the deaths, but the police are also investigating the possibility of poisoning.