Motive unknown as four mass shootings leave at least 45 dead across South Africa
Police are investigating possible links to illegal mining, gang violence, business rivalry and the illicit firearms trade after four mass shootings left at least 45 people dead across South Africa in less than a week.
The attacks happened in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and the Western Cape. They began with the killing of 11 people, including a pregnant woman, at a house in KwaMakhutha on Tuesday, 22 September. Three people survived and were taken to hospital.
By the weekend, the violence had spread across communities near Johannesburg and Cape Town. In Gauteng, 18 people were killed at the Wedela tavern on the West Rand. In the Western Cape, 16 people died in three separate attacks in Khayelitsha, Joe Slovo and Lwandle.
Investigators have not established whether the shootings were part of one coordinated campaign or separate outbreaks of organised and retaliatory violence. Provincial multidisciplinary teams have been set up in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape as police work to identify the attackers, trace the weapons and establish the motives.
The deadliest of the latest attacks took place at the Wedela tavern, where gunmen reportedly entered and opened fire on patrons before searching some of them and taking their mobile phones. Two vehicles were set alight as the attackers fled in unidentified vehicles.
Seventeen people died at the scene. An 18th victim died in hospital on Monday, raising the death toll. Eighteen other people were injured.
Police said investigators had recovered a clear photograph of eight suspects. On Monday, officers moved to a second crime scene and collected further forensic evidence. The suspects remained at large.
Residents said they feared further attacks and believed the shooting was connected to feuding groups of illegal miners, known locally as zama-zamas. The area is surrounded by abandoned gold mines, where criminal groups have taken control of underground workings and compete for access to remaining deposits.
Gauteng deputy police commissioner Fred Kekana said the attack appeared to be an act of retaliation connected to an earlier shooting at the same tavern in August. One of those killed on Sunday was wanted in connection with that incident, he said.
The provincial police commissioner, Tommy Mthombeni, has established two investigative units in the past week. One is examining the Wedela killings. The other is investigating the deaths of 11 women in Ekurhuleni in a suspected serial killer case.
Police spokesperson Brenda Muridili said some communities near Johannesburg were being terrorised by illegal miners carrying rifles. A convoy of police and army trucks moved through Wedela on Monday in a show of force. Heavily armed units stood near the crime scene for less than an hour before leaving.
The scale of the weapons used in the attack has intensified concern about the criminal supply chains operating around South Africa’s mines. Residents and investigators have described armed groups controlling parts of the area, while experts say criminal networks obtain guns from a mixture of theft, illegal sales and smuggling across borders.
Julian Rademeyer, a senior adviser at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, said the cluster of killings showed the “levels of impunity in which people can operate”.
“In all of these incidents, you don’t start off with a mass shooting. You start off with a gradual ratcheting up of tensions and conflict in the community,” he said.
Rademeyer said Wedela had experienced repeated flashpoints linked to illegal mining, including the arrest of important criminal figures in recent months. He said the violence pointed to failures in intelligence and policing.
“There’d been flashpoints of tensions there, which clearly have now escalated into the situation we see. That is a crime intelligence failure. That’s a policing failure. The fact that it got to the point where you have this massive eruption of violence, and police didn’t have the intelligence to be able to take action – that for me is very telling. A lot of this revolves around the absence of adequate law enforcement in communities,” Rademeyer said.
He said weapons entering South Africa from neighbouring countries were helping to maintain a “constant flow of firearms”.
“There are groups, some more violent than others, who are increasingly fighting over mines. I’m aware of one instance where we’ve had a gang that has essentially taken over a mining site, forcing the miners to work for them or be killed. And they’ve been killing off quite a number of people as a warning,” he said.
“These kinds of incidents are there to terrorise, they’re there to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who might consider standing up against these groups. It’s incredibly worrying that we’re reaching this point where, for instance, a group of illegal miners can hold a hilltop with AK-47s, and there’s basically nothing that the police could do about it.”
The violence was not confined to Gauteng. On the same night as the Wedela shooting, three attacks in the Western Cape left 16 people dead.
Four people were shot while sitting outside a property on Mthuma Street in Khayelitsha. Two others were killed at Joe Slovo informal settlement. In Lwandle, 10 people were shot at a shisanyama, a venue where grilled meat is sold and eaten.
Five victims died at the Lwandle scene and five more died in hospital. Eleven people were injured. No suspects had been arrested and detectives had not identified a clear motive.
Western Cape provincial police commissioner Lieutenant General Sizakhele Dyantyi established a specialised multidisciplinary team led by serious violent crime detectives. Officers are investigating business rivalry as one possible explanation for the attack.
Investigators are also examining reports that some patrons had been buying cheaper alcohol elsewhere and bringing it to the establishment. Police have not said that this was the cause of the shooting, but the reported dispute has become one of the lines of inquiry.
In KwaMakhutha, residents linked the killing of 11 people to suspected drug syndicates and territorial disputes between dealers. Police said several of those killed were already on the wanted list in connection with criminal investigations.
Acting national police commissioner Lieutenant General Puleng Dimpane ordered an immediate 72-hour tracking operation after the KwaZulu-Natal attack and condemned what he described as the “senseless taking of human lives”.
President Cyril Ramaphosa condemned the wave of shootings and said security forces had been given clear instructions to “pull out all the stops” to end lawlessness and violence. Earlier this year, he described organised crime as “the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society and our economic development”. The army has been deployed alongside police in some areas with the highest murder rates.
The shootings have also exposed the difficulty of measuring the problem. There is no publicly available national police register devoted specifically to mass shootings, according to Ian Cameron, chairperson of Parliament’s Police Portfolio Committee.
“We don’t yet know the motives behind these shootings. But when groups of armed men arrive together, kill multiple people and disappear, investigators must immediately look at possible organised crime links,” Cameron said.
He said the investigation of mass violence had to take account of the networks behind the attackers rather than focus only on the gunmen who pulled the triggers.
“We need to change how we investigate this violence. Not every mass shooting is organised crime. But when several armed men arrive together, kill multiple people and disappear, investigators must immediately ask whether there is an organised criminal network behind them,” he said.
“This is not about lawfully armed South Africans. It is about criminal networks with access to illicit firearms and ammunition.”
Stanley Maphosa, executive director of Gun Free South Africa, said the attacks showed that the country’s gun violence could not be reduced to the presence of unlicensed weapons alone.
“South Africa has a gun-violence problem that cannot be reduced to an ‘illegal-gun problem’,” he said.
“We must distinguish illegal possession, illegal use, and illegal origin. They are not the same. A firearm can be legally manufactured, imported, and licensed before being stolen, lost, or diverted into criminal hands. A legally possessed firearm can also be criminally misused. The real test of firearm control is, therefore, whether we can account for firearms throughout their life cycle and identify where control fails,” he said.
Maphosa said reports that AK-47 rifles were used in Wedela should concern the whole country.
“Fully automatic firearms are prohibited under the Firearms Control Act, except in narrowly defined circumstances,” he said.
“The important question is how criminals obtain these weapons and enough ammunition to carry out mass shootings. An AK-47 does not arrive at a tavern by itself. There is a supply chain behind it.”
That supply chain is already under scrutiny. Figures presented to Parliament showed that 154 firearms belonging to the South African Police Service and 205 firearms belonging to private security companies were recovered after ending up in criminal hands in the period reported to Parliament. The figures have prompted calls for tighter controls over police stores, security companies and the tracking of weapons after they are lost or stolen.
The shootings came despite a broader decline in recorded murders. Police recorded 5,427 murders between April and June, a fall of 5.9 per cent compared with the same period the previous year. The figures also showed that violence remains concentrated in particular communities and police precincts, with authorities prioritising 140 high-crime stations for stronger intelligence and detective work.
The latest killings have nevertheless made September the deadliest month for mass shootings this year. By the end of August, at least 37 mass killings had been recorded, with at least 153 people killed. After the attacks in KwaMakhutha, Wedela, Khayelitsha, Joe Slovo and Lwandle, the year’s total rose to at least 197 deaths across 41 mass killings.
The Wedela shooting is the deadliest attack recorded since the start of 2025. It is followed by the killing of 13 people in Cleveland, Johannesburg, in June and a tavern shooting in Saulsville, Pretoria, in December in which 12 people died.
For investigators, the immediate task is to determine whether the attacks share suspects, weapons or criminal sponsors. For communities living beside abandoned mines, informal settlements and crowded taverns, the question is more urgent: whether armed groups can continue to operate openly while residents wait for the next burst of gunfire.