L’South Africa is in shock. The bodies of 17 young people, who died without apparent injuries, were discovered in an informal night bar in a township in East London, South Africa, on Sunday June 26. Four other young people who were in this establishment later died in hospital. A previous report put the death toll at 20.
The victims are thirteen boys and eight girls, under the age of 20. The possibility of a stampede or crowd movement was ruled out as no victim would have visible open wounds. According to the local newspaper DispatchLive, the bodies are strewn across tables, on chairs and on the floor, with no apparent signs of injury. On social networks, some mentioned the possibility of gas poisoning or collective poisoning.
“It’s incredible, it’s incomprehensible”
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. The victims, he said, were likely students celebrating the end of exams and the school year
Local television broadcast looped images of the crowds of families and onlookers gathered around this bar in East London, a city of one million people on the Indian Ocean, some 700 km south of Johannesburg. 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, losing 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 in the morning, a simple building surrounded by individual houses.