Ten members of the same family, seven of them women and a 13-year-old boy, were killed in a mass shooting at a house in South Africa, police said on Friday.
A male suspect was killed in a shootout with police hours later, and two men were arrested. A fourth suspect escaped but his identity is known and he is being sought, Police Minister Bheki Cele said.
According to initial reports, the family was ambushed by gunmen at their home in the town of Pietermaritzburg, in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, police said. The shooting occurred in the predawn hours of Friday.
Police initially announced the victims as seven women and three men, but later said at least one child, the teenager, was among the dead.
The oldest victim of the mass shooting was 65, Cele said, and the youngest was 13. She did not give the ages of the other victims.
Cele, who was at the scene, said police confronted four men on a street about a mile from the home where the mass shooting occurred and that the men fired at the officers.
“The police fired, killing one, wounding another, who is arrested and another is arrested unharmed. One has escaped,” Cele said. «Luckily they know who got away.»
Police recovered three weapons.
The suspect killed by police was «notorious» and connected to other crimes in the area, Cele said, though he did not offer a motive for the mass shooting.
The scene at the house where the 10 were killed was «terrible,» Cele said.
“Too many people were lost,” he said.
Police were also questioning the driver of an electronic taxi that is believed to have previously transported the four men when they allegedly committed other crimes.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world and there have been a spate of mass shootings in recent years.
Eight people were fatally shot at a birthday party in the southern coastal town of Gqeberha in January. Last year, 16 people were killed in a mass shooting at a bar in Johannesburg’s Soweto township when a group of gunmen, some of them armed with rifles, opened fire on patrons.
On the same day as the shooting in Soweto, 12 people were shot, four of them fatally, in a Pietermaritzburg bar.