A mass shooting at a house in South Africa leaves 11 dead and 3 wounded, police say

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Police said they were searching for the attackers and no arrests had been made.

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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 neighborhood 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 neighborhood 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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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Gerald Imray, The Associated Press