Pretoria – The death toll in relation to the weekend shooting incident at Nomzamo informal settlement in Soweto has risen to 16, after one more victim was confirmed dead at hospital on Tuesday.
No one has been arrested for the gruesome shooting, but the police in Gauteng said a team of investigators, working with the crime intelligence unit, are on the ground to establish the motive “and eventually arrest the perpetrators involved in this shooting”.
On Monday, Police Minister Bheki Cele who visited the Soweto community in the aftermath of the shootings, said crime scene experts had recovered at least 130 used bullet casings of AK47 assault rifles at the tavern.
“There were about 130 empty cartridges of AK47, which means that those people that were there, really meant (to carry out) business of killing. In an AK47, at any given time you put 30 bullets in it, which means time and again, they would reload. There is suspicion that there were about three of those rifles among those five people that were identified there (assailants),” Cele said.
“But also, there were cartridges of pistols, the small guns. So, the group of people, for whatever reason … they intended to come here and do the damage that they did.”
The AK-47, the Avtomat Kalashnikova, is rated as the most widely used shoulder weapon across the world. It was developed in the then Soviet Union by Russian commander, Senior Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, and is the originating firearm of the Kalashnikov family of rifles. It is a fully automatic assault weapon, meaning as long as the trigger is depressed and it has bullets, it will fire non-stop.
Gauteng police commissioner Lieutenant-General Elias Mawela said the fact crime intelligence in the province was not proactive before the attack did not mean there was no intelligence in the province.
“Intelligence is hard at work here in the province. All our operations are intelligence led. It doesn’t mean that if they missed that one, then intelligence does not exist. It does exist, it does feed us with information. Certain things we want to reserve them because the more we reveal a lot, we are actually empowering the criminals,” Mawela said.
“They will forever counter what we want to do. Some of the tactical details, we prefer not to share.”
On Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa sent condolences to the affected families after two mass shootings on Saturday and Sunday, which claimed the lives of at least 20 people in Soweto and Pietermaritzburg.
IOL