Pregnant woman among 11 killed at party in South Africa

Three gunmen killed at least 11 people including a pregnant woman in a late-night attack at a house party in South Africa, police said.

Three others were wounded in the mass shooting last night in KwaMakhutha township around 30km south of the city of Durban on the east coast.

The people had gathered at the house for a party when the suspects entered the house and opened fire, police said.

Ten people, including the pregnant woman, died at the scene and an 11th person was declared dead at the hospital.

Authorities did not immediately give out details on the condition of the three people who were wounded.

Police said they were searching for three men and no arrests had been made.

The motive for the shooting was not known, police said, but added that some of the people at the house were known to police as part of investigations into criminal activity.

Police said they could not give out any more information on those investigations.

"Although the motive of the shooting cannot be confirmed yet, (a) feud between rival groupings cannot be ruled out," police said.

Thami Ntuli, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, told reporters at the scene that the killings were "really disturbing".

He said that there were known problems with drug dealing and illegal firearms in the largely impoverished community.

It is the latest in a series of mass shootings in South Africa recently, including one in June when multiple shooters killed 12 people in a poor neighbourhood in Johannesburg that police linked to criminal gangs.

Two mass shootings two weeks apart in December killed 21 people.

They were also carried out by multiple gunmen.

South Africa has extremely high rates of violent crime, with official police statistics recording 5,427 homicides in the latest three-month period between April and June at an average of nearly 60 homicides a day.

Shootings are the most common form of homicide in South Africa, and police and crime experts have long said that one of the biggest problems is that there is a high number of illegal firearms in circulation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa authorised the deployment of soldiers on the streets in some areas earlier this year to combat violent crime in what critics said was an admission that police were failing.

Soldiers were deployed to areas around Johannesburg, the city of Cape Town and in Eastern Cape province on the south coast in the ongoing operation, but not to KwaZulu-Natal province where the latest shooting happened.

The bodies of some of the victims of last night's shooting were laid out on the ground and covered with white sheets outside the small house where the shooting took place.

They were later carried away on stretchers to pathology vans.

Police cordoned off the neighbourhood with yellow tape while forensic investigators worked through the scene.

Police were also investigating if the torching of a car near the house was connected to the shooting.