It was about three o’clock on Monday afternoon when Tasneem Simons spotted the three young men approaching her house in Manenberg, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town.

Tasneem, 22, didn’t say anything, but her mother thinks she must have sensed something was wrong, because she stopped gathering in the washing from outside their tiny one bedroom house and shoved her sister out of the way.

It was an act of selflessness that cost her life.

“I didn’t hear the shot. I just heard this lost screaming and shouting, so I ran out and there she was, lying on the ground,” said Jasmine Simons, 54. “It didn’t used to be like this round here. This was the good side of Manenberg.”

Police believe Tasneem was killed unintentionally, the latest of hundreds of victims of cross fire in a gang war that has brought carnage and fear to South Africa’s most affluent city.

The Cape Flats, the sprawling area of townships including Manenberg south of Cape Town, have always been rough.

But over the past few years a drug-fueled crime wave has wrought carnage on a scale that residents, police officers, and even former gangsters liken to a war zone.