Gunmen Kill 4 S. Africa Police Officers, Injure 5

Assailants surrounded a police truck and opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles, killing four black officers and wounding five others Wednesday.

Police combed the sprawling black township of Soweto for the killers.

A caller identifying himself as a member of the militant black Azanian People’s Liberation Army said it staged the ambush, the second such claim made in the group’s name this week. It opposes negotiations between blacks and the white-minority government on installing a multiracial democracy.

The truck carrying 14 officers through Soweto, outside Johannesburg, was attacked when it stopped at a traffic light, police Maj. Herman Oosthuysen said.

Three policemen died at the scene and a policewoman died at a hospital, he said. Two of the five wounded were in critical condition.

“There was a lot of shooting,” Oosthuysen said. “We found at least 30 AK-47 cartridges at the scene.”

A man calling himself Comrade Kaboko telephoned the South African Press Assn. and said five Azanian fighters attacked the police vehicle. He warned of more ambushes “until the land is restored to us.”

Earlier in the week, another caller claiming to be an Azanian member said the group was responsible for an attack at a hotel bar that killed five whites Saturday night.

Both incidents were similar to previous attacks claimed by the group, which is the military wing of the radical Pan Africanist Congress.

Police are considered a prime target in the group’s campaign. Militant blacks denounce black officers as collaborators with the apartheid system.

Blacks, who make up about half the police, account for the majority of those killed. A record 226 officers were killed on duty last year.

Fears of widespread violence and a possible race war have risen since the April 10 slaying of black leader Chris Hani--the popular head of the South African Communist Party--allegedly by a white rightist.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign against apartheid, said Wednesday that recent violence underlined the need for political groups to set a date for multiracial elections.

“If we don’t, we really are in trouble,” Tutu said.

Right-wing groups announced plans to meet Friday to form an alliance against President Frederik W. de Klerk’s dismantling of apartheid. Four retired generals are leading the effort and say it could culminate in the groups’ secession from South Africa to form a whites-only state.

The African National Congress, the country’s leading black group, denounced the plan as “shortsighted” and “dangerous.”

Meanwhile, the government rejected a $11-million plan to defuse an escalating crisis over exam fees in black schools, setting the scene for a showdown with angry pupils, Reuters news agency reported.