A Man is Charged with 76 Counts of Murder in a Deadly South African Building Fire Last Year

BY MOGOMOTSI MAGOME

7:53 AM EST, January 25, 2024

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A man was charged with 76 counts of murder and 86 counts of attempted murder on Thursday for allegedly causing a deadly fire at an apartment building in South Africa last year that was one of the country’s worst disasters.

Prosecutors said he made a written confession in which he admitted starting the nighttime fire that ripped through the five-story building in Johannesburg in August, killing 76 people and leaving dozens injured.

The suspect, Sithembiso Lawrence Mdlalose, was also charged with arson and was ordered to be kept in police custody until a hearing next month when his lawyer is expected to say if he will apply for bail.

He faces a possible sentence of life in prison. South Africa has no death penalty.

Mdlalose’s lawyer, Dumisani Mabunda, said he has received a copy of the confession and believes his client made it voluntarily.

Mdlalose appeared in the Johannesburg courtroom for Thursday’s hearing but didn’t enter a plea in response to the charges. He mostly spoke to his lawyer during the hearing.

Mabunda said Mdlalose had not yet indicated to him how he was going to plead in response to the charges.

Mdlalose was arrested on Tuesday after making a startling claim at a separate inquiry that he was responsible for the fire. That inquiry is looking into the causes of the fire and the failures in safety protocols that led to so many people dying. Mladalose was testifying as a resident of the building.

But he unexpectedly told the inquiry that he was a drug user and set the fire that night while trying to hide the body of a man he had killed in the basement of the building. He said he had strangled the man and then poured gasoline over his body and set it alight with a match on the instructions of a Tanzanian drug dealer who also lived in the building.

Prosecutors said Mdlalose’s confession at the inquiry could not be used in his trial because that ongoing inquiry is not a criminal proceeding.

They said he had since made a written confession in front of a judge and they had begun their own investigations.

The Aug. 31 fire happened at a building that was owned by the city of Johannesburg but had effectively been abandoned by authorities and was being run by illegal landlords who were charging people to live there.

Hundreds lived in the building, many of them in wooden shacks and other temporary structures strewn through the interior. People were living in the basement and in bathrooms, officials said.

Fire hoses and extinguishers had been removed and fire escapes were locked or chained closed, emergency responders said.

Many of the injured jumped out of windows and suffered broken limbs and backs, health officials said.