The police in South Africa mentioned on Wednesday that they’d arrested a person who confessed to beginning a fire in a derelict Johannesburg building final August that killed dozens of individuals, a few of whom leaped to their deaths or have been trapped behind locked safety gates.
The 29-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday on 76 counts of homicide and 120 counts of tried homicide, mentioned Col. Dimakatso Nevhuhulwi, a spokeswoman for the police in Gauteng Province, which incorporates Johannesburg. The person’s title has not been launched.
Officers initially mentioned that the hearth, which tore via an overcrowded four-story constructing within the early hours of Aug. 31, had killed 77 individuals. However a fee investigating the catastrophe was later instructed that the quantity was doubtful due to how badly among the our bodies have been burned.
The hearth focused international attention on a whole lot of rundown, illegally occupied buildings in Johannesburg just like the one which burned, the place poor households who can not afford safer housing have settled. These city squatter camps are generally known as “hijacked” buildings as a result of they’re usually taken over by gangs that deal medicine and extort residents for hire funds.
The 29-year-old man was arrested after testifying on Tuesday earlier than the fee investigating the hearth. The fee’s hearings have been live-streamed, however the man testified behind closed doorways out of concern that gang leaders who had been working out of the constructing would have him killed, the fee’s lead lawyer mentioned.
“His life may be in peril if made public,” the lawyer, Ishmael Semenya, mentioned throughout a public portion of the listening to.
The police didn’t present particulars concerning the man’s reported confession. In keeping with South African information shops, he mentioned in his testimony on Tuesday that he had strangled a person, poured gasoline over the physique and set fireplace to it, and that the hearth had unfold.
These killed within the blaze included not less than a dozen kids — two of them toddlers named Memory — migrants from different African international locations and other people holding down jobs as lecturers and technicians. Neighbors and residents mentioned the constructing additionally housed legal gangs that offered medicine on the sidewalk and robbed passers-by.
The federal government owned the constructing and plenty of others prefer it. Going block by block and looking information, New York Times reporters last year identified at least 127 similar buildings, neglected death traps, within the middle of Johannesburg.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has mentioned that the hearth was a “wake-up call” for South Africa, the place the price of residing places housing out of attain for a lot of, and the place metropolis governments look the opposite approach as individuals occupy garbage-strewn buildings with out water or electrical energy.
The fee investigating the hearth halted its work final 12 months after the constructing that housed it was itself deemed to be a hearth hazard. Its hearings resumed this month.
