S. Africa Police Fire Shotguns at Stone Throwers; 3 Die

Three youths were killed and three more critically wounded Tuesday outside Cape Town when police, hidden in freight containers on the back of a truck, opened fire with shotguns on about 150 stone-throwing young people.

Residents of Thornton Road in the Colored, or mixed-race, suburb of Athlone said the neighborhood had been quiet until the truck, owned by the state railway system and commandeered by the police, drove through.

The truck made a first slow passage down the street, turned around to return and, drawing a volley of stones from youths, turned around for yet a third trip, this time with the police firing shotguns at the crowd.

The residents said that at least six people were killed and that more than 20 were wounded, some of them young as 8.

Conflicting Accounts

Although the police said the shotguns were loaded with birdshot, meant to sting but not kill, Thornton Road residents said some youths were hit with the full force of the blast at almost pointblank range. Residents said that some of those wounded had been shot through the windows of their homes and that soldiers had kicked down doors to seize fleeing youths.

A police spokesman in Pretoria, acknowledging the “Trojan horse” tactics, confirmed that policemen commandeered and manned the truck in an effort to halt the “repeated incidents of stone-throwing and barricading of roads” in the Athlone area.

“We have all sorts of little strategies,” the spokesman said. “But they would not have been shot if they were not throwing stones.”

Earlier Tuesday afternoon, a black man was burned to death, according to his family and neighbors, when policemen fired two tear gas shells into his house at the KTC squatter settlement outside Cape Town, setting it on fire and apparently suffocating him as he slept.

“The police fired a tear gas bomb into the house, and it exploded when one of the boys threw water on it to put it out,” Nonvuyo Mdlanghathi, 22, the widow of Leonard Mdlanghathi, 35, a security guard, said later.

“Others took all the children out,” she said. “While we tried to put the fire out, another tear gas bomb came through. My husband was suffocated by the tear gas, and I was trying to pull him out when I started to suffocate, too. I was pulled out of the house by a neighbor. I had to leave my husband, and he burned to death.”

The police replied that they had fired tear gas only after the house had begun to burn in order to control the crowd and allow firemen to get to the blaze.

But reporters from the local Cape Times, who were in the area and talked with Mdlanghathi’s widow and other residents, said that policemen and soldiers had been firing tear gas grenades as well as shotguns throughout the afternoon. Clinics reported 10 people seriously injured.

Botha Spurns Appeal

In Pretoria, a black poet and supporter of the outlawed African National Congress, who has been sentenced to death in the 1982 murder of a security policeman, lost his appeal for a new trial or a review of his sentence. President Pieter W. Botha refused to reopen the case of Benjamin Moloisi despite widespread domestic and international appeals for clemency.

Moloisi, 31, who is scheduled to be hanged Friday morning in Pretoria, would be the first black executed for a political crime since three guerrillas of the African National Congress went to the gallows in 1983.

The congress, in a statement from its headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, reiterated that Moloisi was not responsible for the policeman’s death and described his execution as “judicial murder.”

After denying any involvement in the slaying, Moloisi admitted in his appeal that he was present when the black policeman was killed outside Pretoria. However, he said that he had been coerced by guerrillas sent to execute the policeman after they threatened to kill him as a former police informer.

His attorneys sought commutation of the death sentence, if not a full new trial, on grounds of coercion.

Moloisi, an upholsterer by trade, was originally scheduled to hang Aug. 21, but a Supreme Court justice granted him a stay 12 hours before his execution in order to present new evidence to Botha. This followed an impassioned appeal by his mother, calls for clemency from South African churchmen and expressions of concern from the United States, Britain and other countries.