Mob taunts cops as killing spree continues

By Alex Eliseev

Three hours before the mayhem erupted, a lone priest stood in the streets and prayed for his township.

In the darkness, Henry Appies prayed for peace. For God to calm the storm.

But the brutal mob inside Ramaphosa, a settlement near Reiger Park in the East Rand refused to release the area from their xenophobic hate and by 7.20am the first police Nyala had to roll in. By 10am a man had been beaten and set alight and another shot in the head. Both men later died of their injuries.

In their hundreds, the mob hunted for foreigners, spilling blood and destroying shacks, shops and everything in their path.

They torched a minibus taxi and watched it burn to a carcass. They hacked open a tuck shop - allegedly owned by a foreigner - and rolled it into the street and burnt it.

Armed with pangas, knives, hammers, axes, pitch forks, shovels and sticks, they sang war cries and fought off police with bricks and glass bottles. As quickly as they dashed from the police, they regrouped and continued their orgy.

A helicopter swooped low to the ground to help control the rioters.

Couches and mattresses burned in the barricaded streets.

Armoured vehicles emerged with ripped up tyres, officers bouncing around in their roof portals. Rubber bullets flew as more smoke clouds rose across the township.

Just after 9am, journalists in the area were led to a grizzly scene. The locals had found a body lying in the sand next to a shack. The man's head was covered in dry blood and his legs were soaked in red. A chunk of a wall had been used to bash his head and he had been set alight. A local bent down over him and touched his side. "He's alive!" he declared. Help was called and police arrived a few minutes later, built a make-shift stretcher out of a mattress and a piece of soft wood and carried the man out into the main street.

A fire truck arrived to take him to hospital.

Earlier that morning an ambulance transported a man who had been shot in the head by the mob inside his shack. He was also believed to be a foreigner.

As the violence raged, and the street battles continued, the rioters chanted: "Kill these dogs! (foreigners)" and "Down with the Shangaans!"

They sang war cries and the national anthem.

Some hurled their insults straight at President Thabo Mbeki.

"It's our president. If only he did something a long time ago!" one man shouted.

"But he's walking hand in hand with (Robert) Mugabe."

Ducking rubber bullets, another screamed: "We are fighting for our country! Crisis, what crisis?"

In nearby Primrose, at the Makause settlement, four bodies were discovered by the police.

• This article was originally published on page 3 of The Star on May 20, 2008