The anniversary turned into carnage when armed men began to "shoot at random".
The tragedy occurred Sunday evening, during a party in a township in South Africa.
Eight people died in this attack, the reasons for which are still unclear.
The day was beginning to fade and the weekend was coming to an end.
In this house in a modest suburb of the port city of Gqeberha (formerly called Port Elizabeth) in the south of the country, the party was in full swing: the master of the place had invited to celebrate his birthday.
Suddenly, two men appear.
Armed, they shoot “randomly at the guests”.
Eight people died instantly, three were injured and taken to hospital, police said in a statement Monday.
“The owner of the house is among those who died,” said Nomthetheleli Mene, chief of police for the Eastern Cape province, without giving further details.
A murder every 19 minutes
Condemning “an attack carried out without mercy and in cold blood”, she indicated that she had ordered the investigators “to pursue and find the perpetrators of the shooting as quickly as possible”.
Blind crimes?
Reckoning ?
Neighborhood dispute?
The reasons that motivated such an attack are still vague.
Interior Minister Bheki Cele is due to go there during the day.
South Africa is one of the most violent countries in the world, notorious for a high crime rate.
Here, a murder is committed every 19 minutes, according to the latest official police statistics.
Deadly shootings regularly shock the country.
In July 2022, four people were shot dead in the suburbs of Johannesburg.
The male victims were sitting around a fire and playing dice when assailants appeared out of nowhere.
No arrests
A week earlier, shootings in two bars in the country had killed twenty people, including sixteen in a tavern in Soweto.
There too, the assailants had suddenly opened fire, armed with large calibers, on a crowd who was having fun and people seated.
The victims were young, between 19 and 35 years old.
As often, the police had condemned violent attacks, but “without apparent reason” and by killers shooting blindly.
Last night, in the township of KwaZakhele in the north of Gqeberha, a small crowd gathered behind the yellow cordon of the police delimiting the scene of the crime, noted an AFP photographer.
A police car arrived on the spot overnight.
Other police experts were dispatched on Monday.
At this stage, the police have not yet made any arrests.
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