Good-hearted uMyfriend’s murder shock!

RESIDENTS of Ny43 in Gugulethu, Cape Town are devastated.

This after a shop owner was found dead in his spaza shop.

A knife and blood-soaked brick were found next to his body on Sunday, 3 March.

The dead man was identified as Badro Ibrahim (34), an Ethiopian national, who was running a spaza shop in the area for the past five years.

His body was found in the spaza shop when his brother and friends tried to call him, but he was unavailable. They went to Gugulethu and knocked at his shop, but he didn't respond.

They went around and realised that the garage door at the back was open. They entered and found his body in a pool of blood with a knife and blooded brick next to him. The shopkeeper he shared the room with was nowhere to be found.

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Residents said Badro was a good man who would allow them to take food on credit from his shop.

It's not clear who killed him, but residents suspect he was killed by a shopkeeper he had employed who lived with him at the shop. Residents believe the man could have been killed on Sunday morning as he opened the shop for a few hours that day.

"He opened the shop at about 7am and sold some stuff to a pastor who was going to a nearby church before closing the spaza again. We don't know what happened, but yesterday he was arguing with his new shopkeeper over change.

"The new shopkeeper was not good with money. A woman went to buy R10 electricity with R20, but she was given R50 change. Badro was angry about that, yet the shopkeeper was stubborn and didn't want to be corrected," said Sean Tiya, a patroller in the area.

Young people from the area said they used to smoke hookah pipes with the shop owner on weekends when he wasn't in the shop. They said he had been in their kasi for five years and they never had problems with him, so his death shocked them.

"We would go to his shop and have hookah pipe with him. He was a free spirit. He was part of us, and a fluent Xhosa speaker. We've lost a good friend," said Busiswa Makalima (24).

Police spokesman Frederick van Wyk said Gugulethu cops are investigating a murder case after a foreign national (34) was found fatally injured on Sunday, 3 March at about 11.30am at a spaza shop in NY43, Gugulethu.

"According to reports, SAPS members attended to a complaint of a murder at the mentioned address. Upon arrival, they found the body of a man lying with a pillow covering his face. He had a large open wound on his forehead, above the left eye and a stab wound to the right side of his abdomen.

"It's suspected that an undisclosed amount of money had also been taken from the cash register. No witnesses are available at this stage, and the motive for this incident forms part of the police investigation. No arrest has been made yet," said Van Wyk.