Alleged drug trafficker and leader of the Wonder Kids gang on the Cape Flats, Christopher ”Ougat” Patterson, was on Friday refused bail at the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court. He appeared before magistrate Grant Engel, who remanded him to July 27 when he and three others, including his wife Denise, are to appear in court again on drug-dealing charges.
Hundreds of people carrying their possessions in makeshift carts fled on Friday from Kenya’s Mathare slum, where at least 33 people have died in a police crackdown on Kenya’s deadly Mungiki gang. At least 500 police officers tore through the shantytown in Nairobi on Thursday, shooting dead at least 11 people.
Two double bomb attacks killed at least 35 people in Iraq on Friday, while gunmen raided the home of a police chief, massacring his wife, brother and 12 bodyguards and seizing his children. A twin bomb attack on a Shi’ite mosque near the northern oil city of Kirkuk killed at least 19 people and wounded 22, police and medical officials said.
Four mineworkers rescued after being trapped underground at the Driefontein Gold Mine on the West Rand suffered only minor injuries, the mine said on Friday. Spokesperson Willie Jacobsz said five workers were trapped at number six shaft near Carletonville on Thursday night after a seismic event measuring 2,5 on the Richter Scale.
Cyclone Gonu, which tore through Oman this week before veering towards Iran, killed at least 32 people and left another 30 missing in the Gulf sultanate, police said on Friday. ”The toll from cyclone Gonu has reached 32 dead … and 30 missing,” a police spokesperson said in a statement published by the official Ona news agency.
The number of awaiting-trial detainees in South Africa remained unacceptably high, National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli said on Friday. He was addressing a seminar arranged in Cape Town by the justice initiative of the Open Society Institute, part of the network of Soros foundations.
Up to 400 child soldiers who had fought with the Islamic Courts Union have been discovered in Mogadishu by government forces, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Friday. They were found during an operation in the trouble-torn capital where the government and African Union forces are struggling to quell the remnants of an Islamic group.
Armed soldiers and police were deployed at schools and hospitals around the country on Friday as the government flexed its muscles to rein in striking public servants. Casspirs off-loaded troops wearing bullet-proof vests and armed with R4 automatic rifles to join police keeping watch at the Kalafong Hospital.
This year the cameras move away from emaciated African children, writes Niren Tolsi
Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s new opera tackles the complex character of a national heroine, writes Brent Meersman