The Education Department must do something about school security, a school principal pleaded on Thursday after the ”horrific” stabbing of one of his pupils with a pair of scissors.
”We conduct searches regularly and have a drawer full of confiscated weapons,” said Jonty Damsell, the headmaster of Zonnebloem Nest Senior School,
The 17-year-old schoolboy is in a stable condition in an unnamed hospital. His assailant is in the custody of his parents.
He has been forced to expel a pupil since the stabbing — also for trying to use a weapon on a classmate, said Damsell.
Another three school pupils have died in violence throughout the country this week.
In Durban, Kufanele Hlongwa (17) was fatally stabbed in the neck and chest by a classmate at a bus stop in Durban on Wednesday afternoon, said KwaZulu-Natal police spokesperson Inspector Michael Read. The Wentworth Secondary School pupils had been arguing about a stolen cellphone.
Hlongwa was taken to Wentworth Hospital, but later died. His assailant had not been arrested, but would be questioned on Thursday, said Read.
On Monday, Moegamat Kannemeyer (19), a grade-nine pupil at a school in Eerste River, in the Western Cape, was fatally stabbed in the chest by a classmate. He died two hours later from blood loss, said Western Cape education department spokesperson Gert Witbooi.
A 17-year-old boy was arrested and charged with the murder and has appeared in the Blue Downs Magistrate’s Court. The two had argued before, said Witbooi.
Also on Monday, eight-year-old Wilfred Kriel was hacked to death by two Nieuwoudt Primary School classmates — aged seven and 12 — in Klawer, 280km from Cape Town.
Kriel had been walking through bush to his home at the Rosendal farm after school with his two attackers when they turned on him, hacking him and beating him to death with a home-made axe and a belt. The two have appeared in the Klawer Magistrate’s Court on a charge of murder.
Their headmaster, John Cloete, described the attack as a ”tragedy” for the school. The child’s body was ”already stiff” when he got to the scene. ”I had to help identify him,” he said. — Sapa