A two-year-old boy was found by a neighbour locked inside his house with the bodies of his dead parents and siblings in Mhluzi, near Middelburg, on Friday afternoon, police said.
Mpumalanga police spokesperson Bertha White said the neighbour saw the child at a window after receiving no response when she knocked on the door.
When she asked him where his mother was, he replied that his mother did not want to wake up, said White.
”She asked him to pull away the curtain and saw a person hanging by the neck from the roof,” she said.
Inside, police found on the floor the body of a 30-year-old man with his hands tied behind his back.
A 30-year-old woman had been strung up from the roof using electrical cords, with her hands also tied behind her back.
A nine-year-old child was found dead in a bathroom, and a six-year-old’s body was discovered on a bed in a bedroom. Their hands were bound too.
Police would not reveal the suspected cause of their deaths.
Post-mortems will be conducted to determine the exact causes of their deaths.
The motive for the killings is also not known at this stage, said White.
The interior of the house had been turned upside down, but it is not known whether anything is missing. There were no signs of forced entry.
The two-year-old has been placed in the care of family members, she said.
No one knows whether he witnessed the deaths and whether he will be able to tell the police what happened, she added. — Sapa