The "necklace" murder has returned to South Africa, with two children its latest victims.
Despite pleas from black leaders, the execution of political enemies by setting fire to a gasoline-doused tire suspended from the victim's neck has re-emerged in recent months.The South African Institute of Race Relations, which monitors political violence, says a score of necklacings have taken place in the past three months of warfare between rival black groups.
Two of the latest victims to be burned alive for real or imagined political crimes were a 9-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. According to the institute's figures, this brings to about 350 the number of victims of South Africa's own brand of street justice, which began five years ago in townships in Eastern Cape province.
Children and women are both the victims and the perpetrators of the practice. Most necklacings have been in Natal province, where the worst black-against-black violence in modern times has erupted between supporters of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and the Zulu-based Inkatha movement.
But even the white areas of South Africa's racially divided cities have not been spared.
Scores of passers-by last month witnessed the necklace lynching in broad daylight of a black man in Hillbrow, a teeming inner-city Johannesburg district where thousands of blacks live in contravention of apartheid laws.
Calls for gangs to end the barbaric practice were renewed last month when police reported the murder near the Natal town of Port Shepstone of a 9-year-old girl. She is believed to be the youngest necklace victim.
Port Shepstone high school principal John Harrison said youngsters had unleashed a reign of terror in the area with the threat of necklacing and murder.
"Hardly a weekend goes by without reports of several necklacings and other killings," he told Reuters. He said many of the killings appeared linked to the trading of "muti" - traditional medicines that fighters take to ensure prowess in battle.
Township sources said the 9-year-old and the 14-year-old were burned to death on suspicion of supplying muti to "the other side" in the civil warfare.
The first recorded necklace murder was in 1985, when the mayor of a black township in the Eastern Cape and four family members were killed by a gang, allegedly for collaborating with the white government. The mob set fire to the corpses using tires as fuel - for the benefit of late-arriving television crews, according to evidence at a subsequent murder trial.
The "necklace" had arrived, and for the next three years scores of alleged collaborators, informers and political enemies were beaten, trussed and then immmolated, their gruesome deaths witnessed by crowds of bystanders.
Lloyd Vogelman, a political violence expert at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said that although death by ritual burning was common in other parts of the world, the use of the tire around the neck was uniquely South African.
Vogelman said it was difficult to understand the reason for the tires, apart from the purely practical explanation that they were easily available in black townships. He said the burning of the body was an illustration of the crowd's desire to get rid of the victim completely.
"It is a means of warning other people not to take part in similar activities," he said. "It is designed to teach others a lesson."