The bodies of 17 youths, who died without apparent injuries, were discovered in an informal nightspot in a ghetto in East London, South Africa, on Sunday, local police who are investigating the cause of the mass deaths said. .
Four other young people who were in this establishment then died in hospital, according to local authorities.
A crowd of people, including parents whose children are missing, had gathered outside the bar in a residential area on Sunday as mortuary vehicles took away the victims, according to an AFP journalist.
Senior government officials quickly rushed to the scene, including National Police Minister Bheki Cele, who broke down in tears as he walked out of the morgue where the bodies were deposited.
“It’s a terrible scene to watch,” he told reporters. “They are quite young. When you are told they are 13, 14 and you go there (to the morgue) and see them. It breaks”. The victims are thirteen boys and eight girls.
Near the morgue, a couple who lost their 17-year-old daughter confide in their distress.
“Our child was there, she died there. This child, we didn’t think she was going to die this way, she was a humble, respectful child,” said her mother, Ntombizonke Mgangala, standing next to her husband.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is in Germany to attend the G7 summit, offered his condolences to the bereaved families. He said he was concerned about “the circumstances in which these young people gathered in a place which, on the face of it, should not have been accessible to minors”.
“It’s unbelievable, it’s incomprehensible, to lose twenty young people in this way,” said the head of government of the Eastern Cape province, Oscar Mabuyane, in shock, who came to the scene of the tragedy, a simple building surrounded by individual houses.
birthday ribbon
Empty liquor bottles, wigs and even a pastel purple ribbon reading ‘Happy Birthday’ littered the dusty street outside the two-storey Enyobeni Tavern, according to Unathi Binqose, a government security official who arrived at the scene at dawn.
Autopsies and toxicological examinations will establish the presence or absence of traces of drugs or poisoning, he added.
The victims were discovered in the early hours of the day in a makeshift bar in the Scenery Park ghetto in East London.
Bar owner Siyakchangela Ndevu said young people rushed to rush into the bar which was already packed, suggesting a stampede.
He told reporters he was called to the scene after 1 a.m. (2300 GMT) because it was “too crowded. Some want to leave and others… want to enter by force”.
Excluding a stampede as the cause of death, Mr Binqose told AFP: ‘There are no visible open injuries.
End of the school year
The victims, he said, were likely students celebrating the end of the school year.
According to local newspaper DispatchLive, “the bodies” were strewn across tables, on chairs and on the floor,” with “no apparent signs of injury.”
Local television broadcast images of crowds of families and onlookers gathered near this bar in East London, a city of a million people on the Indian Ocean, some 700 km south of Johannesburg.
The regional agency responsible for issuing licenses authorizing the sale of alcohol has indicated that it is considering filing a complaint against the owner of the bar for “flagrant” violation of the law prohibiting the sale of alcohol to those under 18.
Many informal drinking establishments – nicknamed “shebeens” or “taverns” – are authorized or tolerated in the ghettos of large South African cities, these disadvantaged neighborhoods once reserved for non-whites before the end of apartheid. But regulations on the legal drinking age are not always enforced.