17 people have been killed in 2 mass shootings in the same street in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Seventeen people, including 15 women, were killed in two mass shootings that took place at two homes on the same street in a rural town in South Africa, police said Saturday.

A search was underway for the suspects, national police spokesperson Brig. Athlenda Mathe said in a statement. The victims were 15 women and two men, she said. One other person was in critical condition in the hospital.

That person was among four women, a man and a 2-month-old baby who survived one of the shootings. Authorities didn’t immediately give any details on the age or gender of the person in critical condition or the medical conditions of the other survivors.

The shootings took place Friday night in the town of Lusikisiki in Eastern Cape province in southeastern South Africa.

Three women and a man were killed in the first shootings at a home, where there were no survivors, police said. Twelve women and a man were killed at a separate home a short time later. The survivors were present at those second shootings. The shootings occurred late Friday night or in the early hours of Saturday, police said.

Video released by police from the scene showed a collection of rural homesteads along a dirt road on the outskirts of the town. Residents sat on the edge of the road as police and forensic investigators blocked off areas with yellow and black crime scene tape and began their investigations.

National police commissioner Gen. Fannie Masemola said he had ordered a specialist team of detectives be deployed from the administrative capital, Pretoria, to help with the investigation.

“A manhunt has been launched to apprehend those behind these heinous killings,” police spokesperson Mathe said.

Local media reported that the people were attending a family gathering at the time of the shooting, but police gave no indication of any possible motive, nor how many shooters there were and what type of guns were used. Police were treating the shootings as connected, however.

Police minister Senzo Mchunu said at a press conference later Saturday that it was an “intolerably huge number” of people killed and those responsible “can’t escape justice.”

“We have full faith and confidence in the team that has been deployed to crack this case and find these criminals. Either they hand themselves over or we will fetch them ourselves,” Mchunu said.

South Africa, a country of 62 million, has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. It recorded 12,734 homicides in the first six months of this year, according to official crime statistics from the police. That’s an average of more than 70 a day. Firearms were by far the biggest cause of deaths in those cases.

Mass shootings have become increasingly common in recent years, sometimes targeting people in their homes. Ten members of the same family, including seven women and a 13-year-old boy, were killed in a mass shooting at their home in the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal province in April 2023.

Sixteen people were fatally shot in a bar in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in 2022, the worst mass shooting in South Africa in decades before the latest killings in Lusikisiki.

Firearm laws are reasonably strict in South Africa, but authorities have often pointed to the large number of illegal, unregistered guns in circulation as a major problem. Authorities sometimes hold what they call firearm amnesties, where people can hand over illegal guns to police without being prosecuted.