Mass Shooting in South Africa Leaves 17 Dead

Most of the victims were women killed in one homestead, according to the police, who have started a manhunt for the gunmen.

At least 17 people from a single family were killed when gunmen attacked two homesteads in South Africa early Saturday, the police said, adding to a rising number of mass shootings in the country.

Gunmen opened fire on two separate homesteads as the victims slept, the police said. The victims all belonged to one family, who had gathered for a traditional ceremony in a village outside Lusikisiki, a town in rural Eastern Cape Province, the police told journalists later in television interviews.

Thirteen people were killed in one homestead, the police said, adding that all but one of the victims were women. Six people survived, among them a 2-month-old baby, Brig. Athlenda Mathe, a police spokeswoman, told a local television station. Another victim is in the hospital in critical condition.

In a second homestead, all four people inside a single house were killed, according to Ms. Mathe.

The authorities have started a manhunt, as the town reels from the killings. Police footage showed dirt roads cordoned off, with forensics teams and uniformed officers working across the two homesteads, one consisting of several houses, painted orange with white pillars, the other made up of modest blue-and-white houses. Stunned community members gathered on the other side of the police cordon, and remained on the scene as rain poured down.

“This is the first time we’ve witnessed something like this,” Lwando Nonkonyana, a spokesman for the local municipality, said in a telephone interview. “And it’s a shock to the area.”

Police officials, who had gathered in another part of the province for a crime-fighting campaign, pointed to the worryingly high number of illegal firearms and high rates of gun violence in the region.

In the past four months, the police have seized more than 430 illegal firearms, including automated rifles, most of them confiscated in the Eastern Cape, Senzo Mchunu, the police minister, said during the news briefing on Saturday. Officers were treating the mass killing as a priority, he added.

“It’s an intolerably huge number of people,” Mr. Mchunu said.

South Africa has for years recorded high rates of violent crime, and the police and experts have noted an increasing number of mass shootings in the past few years.

In January 2023, gunmen killed eight people at a birthday party in Gqeberha, a coastal city in the Eastern Cape Province. In April last year, gunmen stormed a house and killed 10 people at a homestead outside the city of Pietermaritzburg, in the east of the country. And in July 2022, at least 19 people were shot dead in multiple taverns, including in Johannesburg’s Soweto township.

Crime statistics released by the government in August showed that murder rates had increased in four of South Africa’s nine provinces, driven largely by gun violence.