Rioters shot a policeman to death in the black township of Alexandra Monday, the first time rioters have fatally shot an officer in two years of nationwide racial unrest.
Residents of the black township outside Johannesburg said five people, including a 3-year-old child, were killed by police Monoday in the third day of rioting in the ghetto bordering a white suburb of Johannesburg.
If the unconfirmed report is correct, 15 people have been killed in Alexandra since Saturday in one of the bloodiest outbursts since black opposition to the white minority government`s policies of racial separation exploded in violence in September, 1984.
Police could not confirm the five deaths and kept the official toll since Saturday at six.
A police spokesman said a black off-duty detective, Constable T. Tsipa, was shot to death near his home by black rioters. His body was found by colleagues who were alarmed when he failed to report for duty.
About 25 black officers have been killed in the racial violence, but Tsipa was the first to be shot to death by rioters, indicating the rioters now have access to guns. Other police officers have been burned, stabbed or stoned to death.
Unconfirmed reports said police clashed repeatedly Monday in Alexandra with rioters who burned buildings and barricades, threw stones and torched cars. Palls of smoke rose above the township.
The township was sealed off to reporters and nonresidents, but reporters said they saw two bodies lying in a street.
Police said they killed two blacks in Alexandra Sunday night and two more in clashes near Durban and Port Elizabeth, raising the official death toll in nine days of nationwide antigovernment violence to 32, the bloodiest flare-up since Christmas in South Africa`s 17-month-old black revolt against white rule.
Police said a black woman also was seriously injured in Alexandra when unidentified blacks tried to burn her alive with a gasoline-soaked car tire, a form of vigilante execution known as ”the necklace.”
Four more blacks were wounded by police fire and 685 people were arrested, 641 of them when they staged an illegal march at Witbbank, 50 miles southeast of Johannesburg.
In clashes elsewhere, police shot and killed one man and wounded another at Chesterville, near Durban, when a mob attacked private houses in the black ghetto.
