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On a Thursday morning just before 10 a.m., an out-of-control fire swept through a commercial building and connected private residence in the Big Bridge community of Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, leaving a local small business owner with nothing after years of hard work and a recent rebuilding effort. The origin of the blaze remains undetermined as investigators from the Jamaica Fire Brigade continue to comb through the charred remains of the property.

Two fire response units from the nearby Savanna-la-Mar Fire Station were dispatched to the scene after emergency calls came in, confirmed O’Neill Kerr, District Officer for Investigation with the Jamaica Fire Brigade. No lives were lost in the incident, though a small number of people sustained minor injuries while attempting to extinguish the fire before first responders arrived.

The business lost in the fire is a neighborhood variety store operated by a local woman who identified herself only as Sharon. The shop stocked a wide range of daily essentials for community members, from plumbing hardware and personal hair care products to household detergent, groceries and beverages. Sharon recalled the moments she discovered the fire, explaining that she first spotted flames spreading through the middle section of the building, wedged between a residential stove and a refrigerator. She had just been retrieving bottled products from the back storeroom when she noticed the smoke and fire, she said. Immediately after making the discovery, she alerted her husband, who was speaking with a friend at the front of the store. By the time he reached the fire’s starting point, the entire space between the two appliances was already fully engulfed in flames.

Sharon and her husband, assisted by a neighboring resident who joined the fight from the back of the property, attempted to put out the blaze themselves before firefighters could arrive. The group disconnected a water pipe from a large on-site water tank to access water, passing buckets of water to Sharon’s husband, who was inside the building battling the spread. However, the fire grew too quickly for their efforts to make a meaningful difference.

For Sharon, the destruction comes as an especially devastating blow, following recent hardship that she had only just started to recover from. After a recent hurricane passed through the region, her shop was burglarized, with thieves taking nearly all of her inventory and assets. She had spent time and resources rebuilding the business, restocking the store just one day before the fire, on Wednesday, because she prioritizes keeping goods available for her regular customers. Even worse, she had purchased a brand new point-of-sale software system less than a week before the fire, and that new equipment was also destroyed in the blaze. All of her personal belongings, including her mobile phone, purse, and important identity documents such as her driver’s license and passport, were inside the connected dwelling when the fire hit, meaning she now faces the lengthy process of replacing every critical document. With four children between the ages of 8 and 17 to support, Sharon says the total loss represents a crippling setback that has left her struggling to process her emotions.

Kerr told reporters that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, investigators are still in the early stages of their work, and it is too soon to confirm the exact cause of the blaze. Fire investigation teams have already been deployed to the site to collect evidence and assess the scene, he said, and work is ongoing to pinpoint what sparked the fire. Kerr added that officials have also not yet been able to calculate the total monetary value of the losses from the blaze, as the assessment process is still in its early phases.

This report was contributed by Anthony Lewis.

Along the sun-scorched southern coast of South Africa, the informal Giyani settlement in Mossel Bay now bears the brutal scars of a wave of targeted violence that has pitted neighbor against neighbor, killed three people, and forced hundreds to flee their homes. What started as growing anti-migrant sentiment, stoked by a months-long campaign against undocumented foreign nationals, has exploded into open bloodshed, spilling over into neighboring coastal communities and sending waves of panic across the region.

Walking through the settlement today, visitors are met with a landscape of charred, blackened remains of torched shacks, gutted structures stripped clean by looters, and skeletal frames of abandoned homes being dismantled by locals looking to seize the empty plots. On the flimsy wooden doors of a handful of surviving dwellings, a crude graffiti message marks them as off-limits to attackers: “I’m taken, Xhosa” — a signal that the home belongs to a member of South Africa’s Xhosa ethnic group, and should be spared.

Even South African natives not belonging to the Xhosa group now find themselves targeted, caught up in the spreading unrest. A 30-something South African woman, too afraid to share her name but showing her official South African identity document to an AFP reporter, described how she was ordered to leave her corrugated metal shack just days after the initial violence broke out. Attackers falsely accused her of living with a Shangaan man, another South African ethnic group seen as an outsider by local attackers. “They said they don’t care about IDs,” she explained, her voice trembling. “Now it seems like nobody is safe. A lot of my neighbours, they are citizens, they just ran.”

In total, 55 homes have been completely destroyed in the unrest, which erupted after a public protest targeting foreign nationals, who attackers falsely claim are stealing local jobs. In the days following the initial violence, locals told reporters that abandoned homes left empty by fleeing residents are dismantled daily, their materials taken and plots repossessed by local people.

Official data from South Africa’s border management authority confirms that nearly 600 Mozambicans have fled Mossel Bay and crossed back into their home country since the violence began. Nearly a week after the worst of the clashes, around 100 foreign nationals from Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe remain crowded into a local community hall, their belongings piled around them, under constant police guard. Joining them are 17 South African natives from the northern province of Limpopo, who also face targeting because they speak Tsonga and are not ethnically Xhosa.

“Seventeen South Africans were chased away from their house,” explained Ernest Sithole, who has been coordinating support for displaced people at the community hall since Sunday. He added that all those displaced spoke Tsonga, the majority language of their home province.

The violence has already claimed three lives. Two Mozambican nationals, aged 27 and 43, were killed in the initial outbreak of unrest — making them the first known foreign casualties in a months-long national wave of anti-migrant sentiment that has seen mass protests across the country and a flood of xenophobic hate speech on social media. A 19-year-old South African Tsonga man was also stabbed to death the same night. While police have so far refused to officially link his killing to the anti-migrant and ethnic tensions, his stepfather is adamant the murder was a targeted attack.

“I understand they killed my son because of a tribal war,” Steve Winston Kamwendo told AFP, standing beside his stepson’s coffin ahead of the young man’s burial in Limpopo.

The violence comes after a citizen-led group opposing irregular migration recently issued a public ultimatum ordering all undocumented foreign nationals to leave South Africa by the June 30 deadline. In response, several African nations including Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, and Nigeria have already repatriated hundreds of their citizens who chose to flee the growing hostility.

Mossel Bay, long viewed as one of South Africa’s quieter coastal towns in the Western Cape province, has become the flashpoint for the worst violence to date, and the unrest has already spread to neighboring communities. Municipal authorities confirm that around 400 displaced foreign nationals are now sheltering in community centers in the towns of Kleinmond, Gansbaai, and Stanford, roughly 155 miles east of Mossel Bay. In Gansbaai, just one morning last week, around 100 local residents went door-to-door through the town’s informal settlement, issuing a blunt warning to all African-born foreigners: leave the town by the end of June, regardless of whether you hold valid documentation to live in South Africa.