7 More Blacks Killed in S. Africa Rioting

At least seven blacks were shot and killed by police here Tuesday as the funeral for four victims of earlier unrest turned into a daylong battle between police and youths in some of South Africa’s worst rioting of the past year.

According to witnesses, three more people, including a 10-year-old boy, were also killed during the fighting here, and two others died in Duduza, a neighboring black township 30 miles east of Johannesburg. Those deaths, which would bring the total Tuesday to at least 12, could not be immediately confirmed by police.

With the death toll approaching 50 in the last two weeks, tension is high in the black ghettoes that surround Johannesburg and South Africa’s other major cities, and the country appears to be plunging deeper into its spiral of violence.

Police said that five of the men killed in Kwathema were shot with pistols and shotguns when youths stoned and firebombed a black policeman’s home, and that two others were shot later in a similar incident. Thirty-six people were arrested, police said.

Residents, however, sharply disputed the police account, saying that seven people were shot to death by police after being driven by volleys of tear gas from a cinema being used for an all-night vigil before the funeral. An eighth victim was shot and killed later while walking on the street, residents said.

Although police headquarters in Pretoria denied the residents’ allegations, on Tuesday morning, the floor of the Gugulethu Cinema was slippery with blood. Its walls and steel doors were riddled with bullet holes and tear gas canisters and rubber bullets were virtually everywhere inside and out of the theater.

Three more people were reported killed during the daylong funeral as groups of angry youths attempted to firebomb the homes of local black officials and policemen who have come to be despised within their communities as collaborators supporting South Africa’s policies of racial segregation.

One of those shot was a boy of about 10 who was among more than 400 people who had surrounded the house of a town councilman, pelting it with stones and preparing to throw gasoline-filled bottles with lighted newspapers as fuses. As the crowd drew closer, police protecting the house fired shotguns from inside.

Two men in their 20s were killed, witnesses said, in one of the many running battles after the funeral between residents and the large, heavily armed police contingents.

The service drew an estimated 15,000, filling the local sports stadium, and several times that number followed the four caskets as they were carried through the town’s dusty streets to the cemetery.

The four buried here Tuesday were among the nine blacks who died from hand grenade and bomb explosions two weeks ago.

Police said the youths were making a “coordinated terrorist attack” on the homes of black local officials and policemen in Kwathema, Duduza and Tsakane, a third township nearby. But the outlawed African National Congress said police agents posing as its guerrillas had recruited the youths and trained them wrongly in the handling of explosives so they would be killed when they tried to use them.

Four people were killed Friday in clashes with police in Duduza, but their deaths were not officially confirmed until late Monday in what local reporters have taken to be a deliberate attempt to conceal the rising tide of violence. Two other deaths Friday were also not disclosed until Monday.