By Monday, at least six people had been killed, four of them beaten and burned alive, and two stoned to death, according to police. One of the first to die was a 61-year-old , or traditional healer, James Magagula, who was accused of helping the Casanova gang by giving them traditional medicine to make them powerful.

Some reports suggested he was the father of a gangster and was implicated in the killing of a member of a rival gang. A mob surrounded his house and set it alight while he was inside, according to South African police.

It's South Africa's gruesome new twist on the "necklacing" of the apartheid era, when men suspected to be spies or collaborators were burned to death, often by having tyres full of petrol tied around their necks and set on fire.

Vigilante killings are common in South African townships, where communities feel that police don't respond quickly or effectively enough to crimes.

On Sunday, Khumalo was at one end of Khutsong hunting down suspects, according to South African media. In another part of Khutsong, Extension Three, another mob was rampaging, shouting and waving their machetes and sticks.

Residents locked themselves into their houses at the sight of the mob, one witness, Liziwe Mbaxa, 48, told South Africa's newspaper. But the mob spotted Simon Khumalo's son, Akhona, 24, and a 23-year-old friend, Mojalefa Maleho.

The pair ran.

Mbaxa said they knocked on her door but she was too afraid of the vigilantes to open it. She said they jumped over the fence and ran next door to Maleho's grandfather's house. The vigilantes burst into Mbaxa's house and searched the place, lifting up the beds to make sure the pair weren't hiding there.

"They found them next door and I just heard glass breaking," Mbaxa said. "I saw them dragging them on the ground and beating them up. It was so terrible … After beating them, they sent someone to buy paraffin and doused them with it, put a tyre on them and set them alight."

Simon Khumalo's other son, Desmond, called him to tell him of the attack. Khumalo arrived at Extension Three to find his son's burned corpse.

"While I was at the other side of the township, my older son phoned to say my son was being burned. I have never seen a more terrible scene in my life," he told the populist tabloid newspaper, which ran a front page headline "Necklaced!"

"If they trusted me, they would have told me that my child was on the list of the people they were looking for. They did not even tell me they had killed him, I only arrived there to find the ashes," he told the .

Maleho had been released on parole earlier in the year after spending 18 months in jail for robbery. His mother, Esther Maleho, 49, ran home from church when she heard there was trouble, but she arrived too late.

"I rushed home to find him lying dead with smoke coming from his body," she said.

She said he was not a gang member, but was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No arrests have been made in the case, with many residents complicit in the killings and witnesses unwilling to report what they saw to police.

Two days before the attacks, the , which targets a mass black readership, ran a story on gang violence in Khutsong. It quoted a local police commander, Melinda Prinsloo, blaming the court system for releasing juvenile members of gangs into their parents' custody.

On Tuesday the reported that some Khutsong residents believed those killed deserved what they got.

One 32-year-old who claimed to have taken part told the paper: "What we did on Sunday is a sample of what the community is prepared to do." He declined to give his name.

reported another unnamed resident saying: "If the police let them go because they are under age, we will make sure they pay for their sins. We will burn them with tyres as we did on Sunday."