Mkhwanazi: Violence in Amaoti ‘escalating’
KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has shed light on the latest violence that broke out in Amaoti.
Police say over 2,000 community members, some carrying weapons, took to the streets on Monday over the high level of crime in the area north of Durban.
Answering questions from reporters at a meeting with business leaders in Umhlanga on Tuesday, Mkhwanazi said the residents were up in arms after three people were shot and killed in their home on Saturday.
A community meeting was then called at the local stadium.
"Because of the high level of unemployment, a lot of kids are not going to school anyway, they mobilsed and went to the stadium and it was chaos. There was a lot of people in the stadium, on the streets - but the police were there.
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"While that gathering was happening, everyone heard gunshots on the road, two people were shot. In that chaos the shooter also disappeared. The police even if they saw who might be the shooter, they could not engage the shooter because there are too many people in the mix."
Mkhwanazi said the community initially thought the assailants responsible for the weekend murders had returned.
"They realised that actually the people who were shot might have been shot by some of them as community members as revenge from what happened on Saturday. So it is a community that is infested by crime, the population size is [huge], the level of unemployment is high. The whole area has a lot of problems that needs to be solved."
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