Durban, Oct. 19 (PTI) The South African police are struggling for clues in a triple-murder case in which three women of Indian origin were shot dead in a rural Black area near here.

“We are wracking our brains as to why these young girls were abducted, taken to a Black rural area and shot several times,” director Vishnu Naidoo, police spokesperson in the Kwazulu-Natal province, said today.

Naidoo said one of the girls has been identified as 17-year-old Leverne Denisha Naidoo of the predominantly Indian area of Chatsworth in Durban.

“She was identified by her mother at the mortuary in Durban. The mother is quite upset and we’ve not been able to speak to her properly,” he said.

“The other two girls are believed to have been known as Simone and Rashida and they are from one of the former Indian-dominated areas in Johannesburg,” he said.

The women were found shot dead in a sugarcane field in the Black rural area of Folweni near the town of Isipingo in Durban on Thursday night. More than 20 people of Indian origin have been murdered over the past four months.