Africans shot, stabbed, burned

Press, 4 July 1978, Page 8

Africans shot, stabbed, burned

NZPA-Reuter Salisbury

t Fifty-two people have died rin the latest wave ol i ighting and attacks in Rhoi Jesia’s bush war, according to security forces. The bodies of 14 Africans - five of them children, shot, t stabbed, and burned to death - on Saturday night at Kudara i Farm,, some 200 km southeast of Salisbury, were 1 shown to reporters on Sun--1 day. A communique said that I black nationalist guerrillas t also killed 16 black civilians i in other areas, and a white > farmer was killed in a guer- • rilla ambush in north-west Rhodesia on Saturday. Rhodesian troops killed 14 guerrillas, four collaborators, and three members of the Mozambique regular forces who were “assisting terror--1 ists to commit acts of banditry within Rhodesia,” the communique added. The main guerrilla forces fighting Rhodesia are based in Mozambique. I The Kudara Fann bridges 'two tribal reserves known to be heavily infiltrated by guerrillas opposed to the multi-racial “internal settlement” between the white Prime Minister (Mr lan Smith) and three Rhodesia based nationalist leaders designed to lead to majority , rule. ,

Security forces said that 12 black guerrillas first shelled and strafed the main farmhouse. Then, when their ifire was returned, they turned on the black labour compound. A security-force spokesman at the scene said the labourers had been warned six months ago to leave the farm but had refused because they were happy there. The victims included a pregnant woman of 30 and five of her six children, aged between two and 10. They were forced at gunpoint into their grass-roofed hut, which was then set on fire, the spokesman said.

Seven labourers were made to lie face-down and then riddled with bullets. The white farm owner, who asked not to be named, had been visiting his wife in hospital in Salisbury, victim of a land-mine blast 11 days ago. He said that his wife’s father had been killed and his own brother badly wounded in separate guerrilla ambushes this year, and he now planned to give up the farm he had worked for the past 20 years.