Rioters Attack Cars and Police Near Cape Town

Mixed-race rioters hurled a hand grenade at police, threw firebombs at government buildings and stoned passing cars of whites near Cape Town on Wednesday.

The latest rioting came as police disclosed the deaths of four more blacks in white-ruled South Africa, where more than 760 people have been killed in racial unrest during the last 13 months.

The unrest stems from anger against the government’s policy of apartheid, which discriminates against and segregates the nation’s black majority as well as mixed-race people, officially called Coloreds.

A routine police report said the bodies of two black men were delivered to a mortuary Wednesday. One died of shotgun wounds and the other was killed in a firebombing. The report was unclear as to when the men died.

2 Children Wounded

Police also disclosed for the first time that they shot and killed two black men in Cape Town on Oct. 16 and slightly wounded two children, ages 2 and 3, when they opened fire on black youths throwing stones and firebombs.

Mixed-race youths threw a hand grenade at a police armored truck near the Crossroads squatter camp outside Cape Town, but the grenade bounced off the truck before exploding and caused little damage.

In nearby Bonteheuvel, mixed-race youths hurled gasoline bombs at government buildings but caused little damage.

In the Wynberg suburb of Cape Town, a magistrate banned meetings by the anti-government United Democratic Front and by mixed-race parents who were supporting their children in an anti-apartheid school boycott.

Magistrate Hendrik van Wyk also banned all meetings in the Athlone and Wittebome suburbs for people of mixed race until late Friday.

The ban came as black and mixed-race youths stoned cars carrying whites on public highways. Police closed some roads and warned motorists to avoid others, including the major N-2 highway on the city’s outskirts.

White opposition politicians in Parliament accused police of firing indiscriminately into crowds of children and into black and mixed-race residential areas without provocation. They demanded an immediate end to “dangerous firing.”