POLICE are trying to discover the motive behind yesterday's attack on a Johannesburg job queue, which left at least eight black job seekers dead and more than 20 wounded.
The attack happened at around 3 a.m. when several men with handguns and assault rifles' opened fire randomly on 2,000 people queuing for unskilled work at the N-F Die-Casting factory at Alberton, south east of Johannesburg. Four of the wounded are expected to live.
The South African police commissioner, Mr George Fivas, who visited the scene yesterday, said it was still not known who had carried out the attack or why. He described the attack as "coldblooded murder".
Mr Fivas speculated that the attack might have been provoked when a group of job seekers pushed their way to the front of the overnight queue. The presence of a number of heavily armed men acting in unison would suggest that the attack was premeditated.
Police later said that fierce competition for scarce work could be the motive behind the attack, and the killers could have been linked to union or political groups. Killers and victims were black.
The attack was reminiscent of the "third force" black on black violence which killed thousands of people in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The East Rand, where yesterday's attack took place, bore the brunt of the third force violence as supporters of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress clashed. There have been persistent allegations that the apartheid security forces supported and even planned the IFP campaign against the ANC in an attempt to destabilise the anti apartheid movement.
Competition for fares and routes between rival taxi firms has led to gun attacks which have killed hundreds of black drivers and passengers in various parts of South Africa in recent years. But if it does prove to have been job related, yesterday's attack would be the first massacre to stem from competition for jobs.
Although political violence has decreased dramatically with the end of apartheid, South Africa is now plagued by high black unemployment and rising crime. Fifty per cent of blacks are believed to be without formal unemployment, compared to only 4 per cent of whites.