CAPE TOWN -- Three alleged train robbers were dragged from a bar, stripped and set alight with their hands tied in the latest in a string of apparent vigilante killings in South Africa's crime-ridden shanty towns.

Police Superintendent Nina Kirsten quoted witnesses as saying the three men had been suspected of robbing people on trains, and had been followed late on Sunday from the station to a shebeen, or unlicensed bar, in Cape Flats.

"Members of the community took them from the shebeen and took them to a road behind the station. There they started to assault them and set them alight. They were naked, their hands tied," Kirsten told Reuters on Monday.

Vigilante killings have hit the headlines in the past weeks in South Africa, which is struggling with high levels of violent and sexual crime, Reuters reported. Kirsten said the body of another man had been found on Saturday, apparently burned to death in a separate vigilante killing. The South African Press Association reported two more men had been killed in similar circumstances in the Cape Flats district of Khayelitsha on Friday night.

Just a few miles (kilometers) from the plush tourist heart of Cape Town, the Cape Flats is known for its poor shanty housing and gang violence, which has seen at least 10 children killed in crossfire so far this year, police records show.

A swoop on the region's criminals over the weekend resulted in more than 2,000 arrests -- 950 of them for serious crimes.