S.A. police shoot black as unrest simmers on

Press, 15 August 1980, Page 6

S.A. police shoot black as unrest simmers on

NZPA-Reuter Cape Town The police shot dead an 18-year-old black man on Wednesday night in a new disturbance at the squatter shantytown of Crossroads, near Cape Town,., where four people have been killed this week. . •'

A police spokesman, who announced the new death, said the police opened fire with rifles as the young man was about to throw a firebomb at a police vehicle. It was parked near where new incidents had broken out during the evening on the boundary between Crossroads and Cape Town’s sec-ond-largest black township, Nyanga. Cars were stoned during sporadic incidents and a van was found "burnt out near Crossroads.

The victims have included two White motorists, one of whom had recently migrated from Zimbabwe because ci distrust of majority rule there. His. car was smashed up on Monday; and he died

after it was stoned by demonstrators.

The other white died of bums after his vehicle was set alight on the outskirts of Crossroads later that night. The third victim was decapitated by a passing truck on Tuesday night when he tried to jump from his moving van as demonstrators tried to set it alight. The wave of violent protest in the Crossroads area is linked with the police crackdown on unlicensed “pirate taxis” that the African , and Coloured (mixed-race) people around Cape Town have been using instead of buses! Blacks have been boycotting the buses for six weeks, in protest against higher fares. Earlier on Wednesday night a black youth was shot and killed when he threw a petrol bomb at a police car, a police spokesman said.

Riot police were on alert in black areas near Cape Town yesterday. The police, who blamed

young black hooligans, sealed off entrances to the Crossroads camp-on Wednesday night after firemen were stoned by ''gangs of youths. The police said that calm had returned by yesterday morning. But the Cape was still gripped by a boycott by blacks protesting against, inferior education and increased bus fares.

Many, black pupils in the Cape Peninsula have refused to join a general return to school which took place in July after months of countrywide student unrest in mainly Coloured (mixed race) communities. An education spokesman said no pupils were attending classes at black high schools in the Cape. “I don’t think the current wave of unrest and arson can be ascribed to the pupils who are boycotting classes. I think that it is more a tsotsi (hooligan) element that’s responsible,” he said.