Gunmen ambush KZN family homestead and kill 10 people

Police did not give a motive for the shooting in Imbali township.

Seven women and three men were killed, the Police Ministry said.

“It’s a crime scene. Terrible. Too many people were lost here,” Police Minister Bheki Cele told the SABC from Pietermaritzburg.

Read more in Daily Maverick: SA’s multiple murders a mark of nation’s spiralling gun and organised crime crisis

Cele said police management needed to sit down and talk about whether the province needed more police resources.

A Reuters photojournalist at the scene of the shooting saw a mortuary van in the yard of the homestead, into which the bodies were being loaded using a stretcher as worried residents looked on.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with about 20,000 murders recorded every year out of a population of 60 million.

Gunmen killed eight people and wounded three others at a birthday party in Gqeberha in January, following a spate of mass gun attacks in 2022. DM/Reuters

(Reporting by Rogan Ward. Writing by Alexander Winning. Editing by Mark Heinrich and Peter Graff)