S African boy set on fire for `stealing sweets’

JOHANNESBURG, SEPT 28: South African police arrested on Wednesday a shopkeeper accused of setting alight four young boys — one of whom died from his injuries — after accusing them of stealing sweets, a spokeswoman said. The 39-year-old businessman handed himself to the police in the North West province town of Temba, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) North of Pretoria, near the village where the 14-year-old boy was fatally burnt last week, police spokeswoman Erica Roos said.

The man, also an advisor to the provincial education department, apparently fetched the boys from school and took them to his shop where he locked them up and asked them who had stolen sweets from the business, she said. He apparently kicked and punched the children and then doused them with petrol, Roos said.

"He set a piece of cloth alight and tossed it into the room where the children were," Lotty Mphuti, grandmother of the child who died, told the Sowetan newspaper. "He then closed the door. Three of the boys escaped and I could hear my grandson Obed screaming. "Suddenly he emerged in a ball of fire. He was lifted into the air as if flung by something powerful. When he landed on the ground, we poured water on him." Obed Kagiso Mphuti died hours later in hospital.