S. Africa Police Kill Fellow Officer Amid Racial Friction : Unrest: Black man shot during riot squad’s raid on striking officers’ post. Shake-up of apartheid-era command promised.

Rising racial tensions and bitter labor unrest in South Africa’s white-dominated police force led to police officers killing a fellow officer and wounding three others in Soweto on Friday.

Heavily armed members of the Internal Security Unit used dogs and stun grenades as they stormed a barricaded police complex occupied by scores of striking black officers. Gunfire broke out moments later.

A 35-year-old striking warrant officer, Jabulani Xaba, was killed. The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper, reported that he was shot after he held his hands up in apparent surrender. A riot squad member was among those wounded.

About 140 black strikers were arrested, and a police spokesman said they will be charged with mutiny. Police also fired tear gas at several hundred township residents who angrily surrounded the police post, threw stones and jeered the raid.

The scene was reminiscent of the bloody battles police faced, and the brutal tactics they used, during the decades when they ruthlessly enforced apartheid and crushed dissent.

The first major officer-on-officer violence comes after weeks of growing friction between the police rank and file, which is mostly black, and the officer corps, which remains overwhelmingly white.

Unlike most government departments, the police command structure has barely changed since last April’s all-race, democratic election.

But a shake-up is now planned. Sydney Mufamadi, the minister of safety and security, is expected to announce a national police commissioner Sunday to replace Gen. Johan van der Merwe, a holdover from the last apartheid government.

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Likely to be named as commissioner is Gen. George Fivaz, who now serves as head of police efficiency services and is considered untarnished by past police abuses.

Mufamadi told reporters that he will “invite” other senior officers to retire and will seek candidates for provincial police commissioners and division chiefs.

The long-awaited overhaul of senior ranks will “serve to stabilize the police organization internally and put an end to uncertainty and rumors” that have led to poor morale, Mufamadi said.

The divisions and suspicions in the police force have deepened since President Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet declared invalid an apparently covert attempt last year by nearly 3,500 police to gain immunity from prosecution for political crimes under apartheid.

Among those who sought blanket indemnity was Van der Merwe, the outgoing commissioner.

Despite last year’s democratic election and a sharp rise in reported crime, South Africa still has not unified the national police with the forces of the 10 now-abolished black “homelands” created under apartheid to separate races.

Officials in KwaZulu-Natal province, for example, have threatened to hold a police graduation parade next week in defiance of orders from Pretoria, which has complained that the notoriously corrupt local force contains convicted criminals and fugitives.

Formal fusion of the country’s 11 police forces, and equalization of pay scale and rank, will not occur until Parliament passes a sweeping police amalgamation bill, expected later this year.

Members of the mostly black police union launched the strike at Soweto’s Orlando police station Thursday over the suspension of 36 colleagues. They had walked off the job earlier this month to protest alleged racism by five white officers, including the station commander.

The five white officers were reinstated Thursday after a police probe cleared them of the charges.

Union leaders denounced the inquiry.

“This investigation was not done in a proper manner,” said Enoch Nelani, spokesman for the Police and Prison Civil Rights Union.

Police in the largely mixed-race community of Eldorado Park also went on strike Friday, alleging racism by officers. About 50 strikers locked the gates and issued demands for higher pay and the transfer of two white police officers.

In another incident earlier this week, police said, about 20 armed union members forced their way into a senior provincial police official’s office outside Johannesburg. One police officer was arrested and charged with pointing his firearm and malicious damage to property.