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Police in South Africa have launched a murder investigation and deployed extra security after seven charred bodies were found in one of the country’s most violent shantytowns, Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg.
The first alarm concerning two burnt bodies came in to the police on Friday evening. On Saturday morning, five more bodies were found on a pile of bricks in a deserted area nearby. The dead were five men, all in their 20s, who were reportedly bound and burned to death.
– A preliminary investigation indicates that the victims in both incidents were assaulted and burned by the mob, police spokesperson Mavela Masondo told AFP.
According to the police, no motive for the murders has yet been confirmed.
In the shanty town of Diepsloot, with over 350,000 inhabitants, the number of murders and rapes is high. Looking at the country as a whole, there were an average of 68 murders per day in South Africa during the second quarter of the year, an increase of almost 20 percent compared to the same period in 2019.