Cape Town - Until the night of the police dog attack, Somali refugees were finding life relatively peaceful in Bellville South.
Now they fear maybe it isn't so safe after all.
Omar Ahmed, Sharif Hassan and Hassan Omar, the three Somalis savaged by a police dog in Brand Street on Monday night, have all been trading as hawkers in the area for the past three years.
The dog apparently started biting the men while it was chasing a burglar.
Witnesses said the policemen had said they were checking if the dogs could still bite, and when one of the victims' friends asked the m to control the dog, one said:
"Don't tell me what to do you f----ing foreigners".
Ahmed's arms were lacerated, Hassan was bitten on the legs and feet and Omar was bitten on the buttocks.
Provincial Commissioner Lennit Max pledged personally to oversee the investigation into the attack.
"As commissioner I will not tolerate similar events to the incident in Gauteng," he said.
After the TV screening of the Gauteng attack he had his dog handlers "sensitised" and he had issued instructions that the temperament and aggression levels of police dogs be closely monitored.
Commissioner Max also issued a directive that no police dogs should be used for crowd control.
"I will act harshly against a member whose negligence, or malice, can be proved in a dog-related attack," he said.
Hassan Omar told how the group had ended up in South Africa.
"We all fled our country two or three years ago to escape from the war and the fighting.
We are street vendors. We sell hats and shoes and bags for a living.
"People haven't been very hostile to us, except for asking a lot for rent."
Abdurazk Ahmed, translator for the three, said:
"Our biggest problem is rent.
Some of us have to pay up to R700 a month for a room in a flat, and when we talk to local people about it, they are amazed at the amount we have to pay.
Locals are charged much less.
"But we have always felt safe here.
Nobody has ever attacked us before.
We did see on the TV about those other police dogs that bit the refugees, and then we saw what was happening to refugees in Du Noon, and now their dogs are attacking us.
Now it doesn't feel so safe any more."
Ali Abda, a Somali refugee from Mogadishu working in a shop in Brand Street, said South Africans did occasionally threaten foreigners.
"It's happened that South Africans told us they'd kill us because they say we take away their business and take away their jobs.
But most South Africans don't mind us, though.
"Sometimes people come to take away our supplies, and sometimes the police arrest us when our papers aren't right."
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