24-Hr. Toll in S. Africa Riots at 16 : White Cape Town Council Asks End of Police ‘Brutality’

Police battled rioters outside Cape Town today, killing three men and raising the toll in the bloodiest 24 hours of racial violence in South Africa in more than five months to 16 killed, dozens wounded and at least 114 arrested.

The white City Council of Cape Town, nine miles west of Guguletu, voted today to plead for police restraint after the marches that were one of the greatest expressions of dissent in South Africa in the last year.

Saying he had “first-hand knowledge” of police provoking violence, Councilman Gordon Oliver said, “I refer particularly to the security police and (ask) the police to use maximum restraint and refrain from provocation and violence.”

‘Disgraceful Display’

John Sonnenberg, a white member of Cape province’s governing Provincial Council, said police whipped anti-apartheid demonstrators with “obvious relish.”

“This disgraceful display of brutality against demonstrators was shocking,” he said.

The violence around Cape Town was the worst in a single 24-hour period since March 21, when police shot and killed 20 blacks in a crowd heading for a funeral in the Uitenhage township of Langa.

Police spokesman Lt. Attie Loubscher said police killed three men today in the township of Guguletu as violence, triggered by a planned march to African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela’s prison, continued there for a second day.

Child Dies in Fire

State television reported that a 3-year-old child burned to death in a firebombing in Guguletu on Wednesday and said scores of people injured in today’s clashes were ferried to a clinic in the Crossroads squatter camp for treatment.

Elsewhere, the home of a black mayor who recently told government television that he supported the state of emergency decreed July 21 was burned down by arsonists, police said today. Thamsanqa Linda, the mayor of Ibhayi, a black area near Port Elizabeth 610 miles south of Johannesburg, had appeared on television news Tuesday thanking President Pieter W. Botha for sending the army into black areas.

Residents of the Diepkloof area of Soweto said policemen and soldiers surrounded a school this morning where they suspected blacks were holding a secret meeting of the Congress of South African Students, which was outlawed Wednesday.

A brief clash broke out and the security forces set upon the students inside the school, residents told the Associated Press by telephone. There were no reports of casualties.

U.S. stays with its policy, Part 1, Page 13.