The 43-year-old international star was shot Thursday night in an apparent car snatching attempt by men suspected to be armed robbers in Johannesburg’s southern Rosettenville suburb. A spokeswoman for the police said the late star was dropping his son off in the suburb when the incident occurred.
Late Lucky Dupe, another eye witness, rendering a graphic account,disclosed that he was shot in his Chrysler sedan car by two men who opened his door.In an attempt to escape,the wounded musician drove away and hit another car, causing him to lose control and hit a tree. All attempt by medics to revive him failed as he reportedly died on the spot.
Dube recorded more than 20 albums in a career spanning more than two decades.
Respect
The singer switched to reggae style in the 1980s to express his anger against South Africa’s former racist white-minority regime.
He would be remembered as one of South Africa’s best selling artistes and one of its most outspoken performers.. The late South African reggae sensation was the son of a single mother who thought she could not have children. Her first child therefore was given the name “Lucky”. [...]
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A team of gunmen shot and killed Lucky Dube, an international reggae star and one of the nation’s best-known musicians, apparently in a carjacking attempt late Thursday that underscored the continuing peril of violent crime here.
As the provincial police commissioner appointed seven veteran investigators to chase down the attackers, President Thabo Mbeki called on the nation “to confront this terrible scourge of crime, which has taken the lives of too many of our people, and does so every day.”
The police said Mr. Dube, 43, was shot by three assailants in Rosettenville, just south of downtown Johannesburg, as he dropped off his 15-year-old son at his brother’s house. Mr. Dube’s son was in the car at the time, they said.
The attackers fled after Mr. Dube crashed his Chrysler into a tree. He died at the scene.
The principal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said, “The circumstances surrounding his murder again illustrate that violent crime in South Africa is out of control, and that the government’s remedies to address this scourge have failed.”
South Africa has reduced the homicide rate by 41 percent since becoming a democracy in 1994, experts say, but the pace of killings and other violent crimes remains among the world’s highest, and attacks both on ordinary citizens and on high-profile figures, including politicians and the police, are a daily occurrence.
The government has committed to reduce so-called contact crimes, in which criminals confront victims, by 7 percent annually. Figures for the last annual reporting period, which ended in March, showed declines in attempted murders, assaults, rape and several other categories.
But homicides rose to 19,200, a 3.5 percent increase, reversing a long drift downward. Aggravated robberies, in which criminals assault and rob victims, leaped by nearly 6 percent, to more than 126,000. And carjackings rose 6 percent, to a level not seen in four years. [...]
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