White supremists suspected in SA bombings

A series of bomb blasts ripped through the poor South African township of Soweto today, killing one person.

Police were investigating whether white extremist militants were behind the attacks, which also damaged a mosque and several railway stations.

Officers across Gauteng province were put on high alert as nine bombs went off and one was safely disabled.

“We all pray that there won’t be any more,” police spokeswoman Henriette Bester said. “It’s daylight now, and the darkness shielded whoever had been responsible for this.”

Teams of officers fanned out across the sprawling township and began searching public places, including schools.

“The kinds of explosive used cannot be determined at this stage. It is unknown who is responsible, no one is claiming responsibility and no arrests have been made,” Bester said.

Nomvula Mokonyane, the provincial minister for safety and security, said police were investigating the possibility that white, extreme right-wing militants were behind the explosions.

“There will be investigations on everything. Nothing will be left unattended to,” she said.

In recent weeks, police have discovered several weapons caches, including home-made bombs, and have arrested 14 people accused of involvement in a white plot to attack the government.

The men, whom police described as a “maverick, isolated group intending to destabilise the country,” were due to go on trial next year. Authorities say the ringleaders remained at large.

The first bomb exploded at about midnight last night, ripping a hole in a mosque, Bester said.

Soon after midnight, four more bombs blew up near a railway station, she said. A pair of bombs exploded at another station, and another pair on a third rail line.

A 42-year-old woman was killed as she slept when debris from one blast hit her squatter shack, Bester said. The woman’s 51-year-old husband sustained head injuries and was in a serious but stable condition.

A 10th bomb was found at a nearby garage and defused by a bomb disposal squad.

Local and national law enforcement officials held an emergency meeting in Soweto to discuss the situation.

Mokonyane said the attack was “quite disturbing, very shocking, and it deserves the condemnation of all South Africans.”

“This is actually against our own democracy,” she said. “We cannot allow this kind of anarchy.”

The explosions severely damaged several local railway lines, throwing the morning commute to work into confusion.

The opposition Democratic Alliance condemned the blasts as “cowardly and outrageous acts of pathetic and hopeless people”.

“We urge all Johannesburg’s citizens to unite in rejection of this violence,” it said.

Soweto is a vast black township of about 1.5 million people south of Johannesburg that includes a diverse patchwork of neighbourhoods – from squatter camps to areas of new wealth. Many of the residents depend on the railway line to get to jobs in Johannesburg.

South Africa’s racist, white apartheid regime ended with the country’s first all-race elections in 1994.

A very small minority of whites strongly oppose the country’s multiracial democracy and advocate a return to the old regime.