Protesters set fire to fourth vehicle over shack demolition

Another city vehicle was set alight inside the eThekwini municipality landfill site on Thursday morning.

This follows a day of destruction on Wednesday in which two trucks and a city bus were torched‚ allegedly linked to a protracted housing protest on the fringes of the Clare Estate informal settlement near the landfill site.

The bus‚ which had been travelling on the N2 and Umgeni Interchange‚ was halted by a barricade and later set alight on Wednesday night.

Earlier in the day residents from the settlement‚ which flanks the freeway and the interchange‚ had halted traffic and then set a Durban Parks truck alight.

A second truck was torched on the interchange.

EThekwini metro police spokesperson Sewpersadh Parboo said that the bus driver escaped the incident unharmed. “The man had fled when the group of people stopped him in the road and began to set the bus on fire‚” he said.

“This protect action comes in response to the demolishing of new shacks by the city’s Land Invasion Unit‚” he added.

Parboo said that riot police had been deployed to the hotspot and would monitor the backlash over the course of Thursday.