Cape Town | Tuesday
A MOB doused three suspected murderers with fuel and burned them to death in South Africa’s Khayelitsha township south of Cape Town at the weekend, a police representative said on Monday.
“A crowd of people arrested three men whom they accused of killing businessmen in the area and poured fuel over them and set them alight. They burned to death,” said Superintendent Wicus Holtzhausen.
Holtzhausen said the crowd, reported by the local press to have numbered about 3 000, claimed the men had confessed to the killings at a kangaroo court before they were executed on Sunday.
Leonard Ramatlakane, safety and security minister for the Western Cape province, said the three alleged killers were young and had lived in Khayelitsha.
Critics of the government likened the mob murders to the infamous necklace killings of the years before multiracial democracy in 1994, when crowds set ablaze suspected collaborators with the white minority regime.
“This brutal act, reminiscent of the apartheid era, has serious implications and shows us what happens when a community brutalized by crime and left at the mercy of an ailing justice system strikes out,” said Hennie Bester, leader of the Democratic Alliance in the Western Cape legislature.
Ramatlakane said residents of the township’s Site C area had handed them over to the police on Friday but took the law into their own hands when they were released 48 hours later.
“It is understood … that members of the Site C community were angry by the refusal of police to continue detaining these alleged criminals” beyond the legal period for holding suspects without charging them, he said.
Ramatlakane said he was trying to establish why the men had been released when it appeared from a police report that there had been enough evidence to lay charges.
“Apparently an order came from another police unit that they should be released. I can only guess that it is because the 48 hour-deadline was approaching but according to the station report they were supposed to remain in custody because there was enough evidence,” he said.
He said police were investigating the killings and also said steps should be taken “if the police fail to do their job properly”.
“We will not allow vigilante action by a few,” Ramatlakane said.
Security analysts say mob justice has been on the increase in South Africa’s townships and rural areas in the past five years, fuelled by police inefficiency and the perception that the courts fail to deliver justice.
In another mob killing reported by police on Monday, local residents killed a 57-year-old man on Sunday at St Faiths in the south of the eastern KwaZulu-Natal Province.
Police representative inspector Moses Gambushe said Bongi Nkosi Danta Memela was lynched by people for the alleged rape of an eight-year-old girl.
No arrests had yet been made in connection with the incident, police added.
On Sunday, police rescued a man suspected of killing a street vendor in Industria, south of Johannesburg, from a 300-strong crowd who wanted to kill him by placing a burning car tyre around his neck. – AFP