Shooting at bars in South Africa leaves at least 19 dead

Gunmen killed 19 people in two apparently random shootings within hours of each other in bars in South Africa, police said on Sunday, underscoring the country’s grim status as a global center for killings.

Assailants armed with rifles and pistols opened fire at the Orlando East bar in Soweto township early on Sunday, killing 15 people and wounding nine, police said.

“You can see from the way the bullet shells are thrown around that they were just shooting at random,” said Elias Mawela, police commissioner for Gauteng province.

Sololo Mjoli’s two sons, Sthembiso, 34, and Luyanda, 18, and both were killed in the attack at the bar in one of Soweto’s poorest neighborhoods, made up mostly of sheet metal shacks.

“I am heartbroken,” said the 59-year-old gardener, adding that Stemibiso’s girlfriend arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting to find him still breathing.

“Then he was rushed to the hospital, where he died.”

Bar waiter Thobani Mhlabiso said he hid behind the fridge to survive the attack.

“There was blood everywhere,” he said.

Police confirmed a second apparently random shooting hours earlier, around 8:30 pm on Saturday, at a tavern in Pietermaritzburg, 500 km southeast of Soweto, which saw four people dead and eight wounded.

Police said they did not believe the two shootings were linked. The killers in both incidents are on the run, according to police, who said it was unclear how many assailants were involved in each shooting.

South Africa, home to around 60 million people, is one of the most violent countries in the world, with 20,000 people murdered every year, one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.

There are about 3 million registered guns in the country, according to campaign group Gun Free South Africa, although many more are circulating on the black market.

At the scene of the shooting in Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, crowds gathered around the police cordon as officers scoured the area for clues – one of them carrying zippered bags filled with used rounds of bullets.

Soweto is the largest of the country’s black townships. They were the creations of the white minority government, which ended in 1994, but whose legacy of widespread poverty, youth unemployment and violence persists nearly three decades later.

Gauteng Police Commissioner Mawela told Reuters there was a third shooting during an alleged robbery at a tavern in Katlehong, also outside Johannesburg, on Thursday night that killed two people and wounded two others.

The Soweto massacre comes as the country still mourns the deaths of 22 young people – some of them as young as 13 – who died under as-yet-unexplained circumstances in an east London tavern last month.