At least eight dead after shooting in South Africa

Eight people in one small house in a South African township were found shot dead, police said Saturday, the latest such mass shooting in a country battling a wave of gun violence and gang turf wars.

Six men and two women, ages 22 to 40, were found “lying in a pool of blood with multiple gunshot wounds,” police said in a statement. An unknown number of assailants had reportedly entered the home Friday night and opened fire, killing those inside, the statement said.

It is unclear whether the victims were related. Police said they had started a search and were investigating a possible motive.

South Africa has long recorded high rates of violent crime, but more recently gunmen have started targeting taverns and family gatherings in assassination-style hits. Experts say the violence is often the result of turf wars and reprisals between criminal networks. Police say such shootings also highlight the role of family networks in criminal activity, as well as the targeting of relatives in revenge killings.

“These tragic incidents underscore the urgent need to address deeply rooted familial conflicts and improve community engagement to prevent such violence,” Senzo Mchunu, the country’s police minister, said in November during a presentation of quarterly crime statistics.

In September, 18 members of a multigenerational family were gunned down in a rural homestead in Eastern Cape province. Most of the victims were women who had gathered to prepare for a traditional ceremony, police said. Police charged a 45-year-old man in the shooting.

In January 2023, gunmen killed eight people at a birthday party in Gqeberha, a coastal city in the same province. In April of that year, gunmen stormed a house and killed 10 people at a homestead outside the city of Pietermaritzburg, which is in the east of the country. And in July 2022, at least 19 people were shot dead in multiple taverns, including in Johannesburg’s Soweto township.

On Saturday, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, Thamsanqa Ntuli, visited the latest crime scene, looking inside the house in an informal settlement in Umlazi, a township outside the eastern city of Durban, according to the South African Broadcasting Corp. and other local outlets. With a yearslong housing backlog, millions of South Africans live in crowded neighborhoods without proper running water, electricity or policing.

In recent months, South African police officials began a campaign to crack down on crime, but said that the high number of illegal firearms in circulation had contributed to the gun violence. The latest crime figures available reported that 6,953 people were murdered in the country from October 2024 to December 2024, a slight decrease from the figures over that period a year earlier.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.