2 September 2010 / AP, MAPUTO
Police opened fire on Wednesday on stone-throwing crowds who were protesting rising prices in this impoverished country, and a local TV station said six people were killed.
The mobs also burned tires and ransacked shops in the capital. Police responded by firing shots into the crowds and the air. S-TV, a private station, said the dead included one child. The station said three adults were declared dead in hospitals and the other two died in the streets. The station gave no other details. It was not immediately clear if any of the six had fallen to police bullets or died from other causes. A witness saw an ambulance remove the apparently lifeless body of a boy who had a severe head wound. The government hasn’t given any casualty figures from Wednesday’s rioting. Police appealed for calm on state radio and TV and said they had made an unspecified number of arrests. Police had declared the marches illegal, saying no group sought permission to hold them. Word had spread for days in this former Portuguese colony in southeast Africa that there would be demonstrations. Thousands of protesters, most of them young men, lined the streets of Bagamoyo, a crowded, impoverished neighborhood just north of downtown Maputo.
