2 Killed in S. Africa Township During Visit by ANC Leaders

Gunfire erupted as a high-level African National Congress delegation toured this violence-plagued township Sunday. Two people, including a journalist, died in the shooting.

Abdul Shariff, 31, a South African free-lance photographer on assignment for the Associated Press, was shot once and pronounced dead at Natalspruit Hospital in Katlehong. Witnesses said he was wounded in the back while running across a clearing.

Two other journalists were injured, and police said they shot to death one man and arrested three people while confiscating four AK-47 automatic rifles. Township residents said at least two other people were also shot.

ANC Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa and Communist Party chief Joe Slovo led the delegation into Katlehong, one of South Africa’s most violent townships, after recent reports that ANC supporters were attacking each other.

Within minutes after they started walking on a dirt road through a neighborhood of burned-out and damaged houses, shots rang out from the direction of a workers hostel dominated by Zulu supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, the ANC’s main black rival.

ANC President Nelson Mandela quickly blamed the government of President Frederik W. de Klerk for not cracking down on such violence, which he said is a daily occurrence in Katlehong, 12 miles southeast of Johannesburg.

“There is no excuse for the police not doing their duty. . . . The police should not allow any people to fire at innocent residents,” he said in a televised interview Sunday night.

After the initial shots, gunfire crackled sporadically for 40 minutes from the area of the hostel and from AK-47s and handguns carried by scurrying township residents.

There was no immediate information about the man killed by police or the other people wounded.

Much of the political fighting that killed more than 3,000 blacks last year, including 1,200 in Katlehong and the neighboring Thokoza township, stemmed from the ANC-Inkatha power struggle.

Slovo said he believed Inkatha supporters started the shooting, and that although police were present in the township, none were near where the gunfire occurred.