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South Africa's amnesty nets almost 95,000 illegal guns

JOHANNESBURG, Saturday (AFP) A firearms amnesty introduced on New Year's Day to help South Africa battle its image as one of the world's most crime-prone countries has netted a final tally of 94,631 guns and more than a million rounds of ammunition, police said Friday.

"A total of 94,631 guns and 1,764,246 rounds of ammunition were surrendered to the police in the national six months amnesty period that expired at midnight on Thursday," spokesman Lazarus Tlomatsana said.

In the period between 2003 and 2004 "there were more than 18,000 people killed and more than 10,000 of them were killed with firearms," Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqkula said on Tuesday.

He announced that more than 80,000 guns had been handed in by Tuesday, two days before the campaign to curb violent crime ended.

The deadline had originally been set for March 31. Senior Superintendent Tlomatsana told the SAPA news agency police were "very satisfied (...) we have achieved our goal." By taking these arms out of circulation, Minister Nqakula added, many lives would be saved. "I was trained to use firearms but I hate firearms because I know what they do, what they are capable of doing," said Nqakula, a former guerrilla during the armed struggle against apartheid.

After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa's borders opened and gun trafficking increased, notably from Mozambique where a 16-year-old civil war ended in 1992 and hungry soldiers and civilians were trading guns for food.

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