Mass Shooting at South African Hostel Bar Leaves 11 Dead, Including Three Children
A mass shooting carried out on Saturday by multiple suspects in an unlicensed bar near the South African capital has left at least 11 people dead, police confirmed. The victims included three children aged 3, 12 and 16.
Another 14 people were wounded and taken to hospital, according to a statement from the South African Police Services. Police did not provide details on the ages of those injured or their conditions.
The shooting occurred at a bar inside a hostel in the Saulsville township, west of the administrative capital Pretoria, in the early hours of Saturday. Ten of the victims died at the scene, while the eleventh succumbed to injuries in hospital, police said.
The children killed were a 3-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl. Police stated that they were searching for three male suspects.
“We are told that at least three unknown gunmen entered this hostel where a group of people were drinking and they started randomly shooting,” police spokesperson Brig. Athlenda Mathe told national broadcaster SABC. She said the motive for the killings was not clear. The shootings happened at around 4.15 a.m., she added, but police were only alerted at 6 a.m.
South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and recorded more than 26,000 homicides in 2024, an average of more than 70 a day. Firearms remain the leading cause of death in homicides.
The country of 62 million people has relatively strict gun ownership laws, but many killings are committed with illegal firearms, authorities say.
There have been several mass shootings at bars, sometimes called shebeens or taverns in South Africa, in recent years. One such incident killed 16 people in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in 2022. On the same day, four people were killed in a mass shooting at a bar in another province.
Mathe said that mass shootings at unlicensed bars were becoming a serious problem, noting that police had shut down more than 11,000 illegal taverns between April and September this year and arrested more than 18,000 people for involvement in illegal liquor sales.
Recent mass killings in South Africa have not been confined to bars. Police reported that 18 people were killed, 15 of them women, in mass shootings minutes apart at two houses on the same road in a rural part of Eastern Cape province in September last year.
Seven men were arrested for those shootings and face multiple charges of murder, while police recovered three AK-style assault rifles believed to have been used in the attacks.
