5 hours ago
4
Six people have been shot dead in two days in a crime-plagued area of Cape Town, adding to the death toll in a city already reeling from the scourge of gang-related violence.
At 11.30pm on Monday, two women aged 19 and 25 were killed and a 24-year-old woman injured in a shooting in Wallacedene, an informal settlement on Cape Town’s north-eastern edge, according to South African police. About 10 minutes later, two other women in their 20s were killed by gunshots to the head in a bedroom in the same area, with police saying the incidents may be linked.
The suspected double murders came a day after a 20- and 22-year-old, whose genders were not disclosed by police, were killed in neighbouring Eikendal.
On 5 September, a man was shot dead at a magistrates court in suspected gang violence, the third killing in a Cape Town court since April.
Cape Town is one of the most violent cities in one of the most violent countries in the world. The murder rate in South Africa is behind only Jamaica and Ecuador, according to data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Last year, Cape Town had the second highest murder rate of any municipality in South Africa, behind Nelson Mandela Bay, and the 16th highest globally, according to Seguridad Justicia y Pas, a Mexican NGO.
More than 2.4 million people visited Cape Town in 2024, according to city authorities, drawn by its beaches, mountains and nearby vineyards. However, the city is deeply divided between opulent suburbs and the poorer Cape Flats townships, where non-white people were forced to move after the apartheid regime passed the Group Areas Act in 1965.
“Our communities are fearful,” Lynn Phillips, from the Cape Flats Safety Forum, told AFP last week at an anti-gang protest. “We don’t have to switch on Netflix to hear gun violence. We sleep, we eat, and we wake up with gun violence.”
Western Cape police said last week they were carrying out “targeted operations” in Cape Flats hotspots to seize firearms and ammunition. A statement said “The message is clear: illegal firearms and those who profit from them have no place in our communities. Our operations will continue without fear or favour, until gangsterism and the violence associated with it are rooted out of the Western Cape.”
The acting police minister, Firoz Cachalia, told Cape Flats community members at a meeting on Tuesday that local police did not have the capabilities for “intelligence-driven operations” to successfully tackle gangs and organised crime, according to local media reports.
“There is no proper plan in Cape Town to deal with gang violence in the province,” said Cachalia, who is from the African National Congress party, while Cape Town and the Western Cape are run by their national coalition partners, the Democratic Alliance.
More than 26,000 people were murdered in South Africa last year, according to South African police data. Almost 3,500 of those were in Cape Town, according to Seguridad Justicia y Pas.
