10 of a family, including teenager, killed in mass shooting in South Africa

Ten members of the same family, seven of them female and at least one of them a child, were killed in a mass shooting at a house in South Africa, police said on Friday.

According to initial reports, the family was ambushed by gunmen at the home in the city of Pietermaritzburg in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, police said. 

The shooting happened Thursday night or early Friday morning.

Police initially announced that the victims were seven women and three men but Cele said at least one child, a 13-year-old, was among the dead.

Cele, who was at the scene, said police confronted four men on a street about a mile from the house where the mass shooting occurred and the men shot at officers. 

Police were also questioning the driver of an e-hailing taxi who is believed to have previously transported the suspects when they were suspected of committing other crimes.

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and there has been a spate of mass shootings in recent years. Eight people were fatally shot at a birthday party in the south coast city of Gqeberha in January.

Last year, 16 died in a mass shooting at a bar in the Johannesburg township of Soweto when a group of armed men, some of them wielding rifles, opened fire on customers. 

On the same day of that Soweto shooting, 12 people were shot, four of them fatally, at a bar in Pietermaritzburg.