New Delhi, Oct. 9 -- Acting national police commissioner Lt. Gen. Puleng Dimpane said 10 vehicles were torched in Johannesburg's Soweto township and 14 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal province, where three people were arrested.

"The right to raise concerns and to protest does not give anyone the right to commit crime," she said, adding that public-order police deployments had been reinforced in areas facing unrest.

Protests in Soweto and Durban opposed the Constitutional Court's decision to remove procedural barriers to seeking asylum. They followed months of anti-immigrant tensions, with demonstrators demanding the deportation of foreigners living in South Africa illegally.

The Soweto violence, which left several burned-out cars lining the s...