A neighbour of a19-year-old manwho was shot dead during the Shaun 101 street bash in Soweto and witnessed the incident says criminality among young boys in the township has become “a fashion” and violent attacks at year-end street parties are now the norm. The teen was one of four men stripped naked and assaulted during an alleged mob justice attack in Diepkloof Zone 5 in Soweto in the early hours of Thursday. Residents say the violence erupted after a string of robberies as crowds dispersed from the bash.
Kamogelo Tshifhiwa Nndwammbi, who lived next door to the young man killed, said the scenes were “devastating”. “We were sitting there. It’s an event that everybody attends every December.
So it was chaos, it happens that there are different groups of boys there in the hood.” Nndwammbi described the bash as “crawling with different groups of boys drinking, snatching phones, doing whatever”. “I wouldn’t regard my neighbour as an angel, but I would say he was also there for certain agendas. People wouldn’t want to brutally kill you like that for nothing.
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“It was mob justice, but then there was an individual who went in with a gun and shot him dead on the spot. The guy who shot him is probably the driver of the taxi which the guys vandalised.” Nndwammbi said violence at such gatherings was “becoming a fashion” in Soweto. “Seeing someone being shot dead right in front of me was devastating.
I don’t want to lie; I can’t even recover from it. It’s a pandemic for us people of Soweto.” He said local gangs of young men, calling themselves “amapantsula”, routinely terrorise parties and rob revellers.
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