As the crowd swings kicks and punches at the young Tanzanian, he covers his head and tries to escape from the angry crowd screaming that he is a thief.
The throng swells, attracted by the shouts, but he somehow manages to slip away between the second-hand shoe stalls and disappears, fleeing for his life. He is one of the lucky ones.
Every day brings new tales of suspected robbers being lynched by crowds in Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries, where more than half the population lives on less than US$1 a day. Suspects are often hacked with machetes before being "necklaced" with old tyres soaked in petrol and set alight to the cheers of bystanders.
"Everyone knows who the thieves are, so when we catch them they get exactly what they deserve," said Abdul, who sells clothes on a busy street corner in the centre of Dar es Salaam.
Sometimes the mobs claim innocent victims in their passion and haste to make an example of criminals.
"Dar es Salaam is getting more dangerous, and it is getting more dangerous very quickly," said one European professional who is moving back to France. "Just the other night a woman was carjacked outside her house near us. They fired through the side window, but luckily the bullet missed her."
Others stress that the city and the vast country as a whole have a long way to go before they experience the level of violent crime seen elsewhere in Africa.
"I still feel much safer walking around here at night than in Dublin," said Dennis, an Irish student at a university in Dar es Salaam.
But armed crime is on the increase in Tanzania, much of it blamed on illegal immigrants and refugees from the wars in neighboring Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Vigilante groups have sprung up in response to what communities say is a lack of protection from under-funded, demoralized and corrupt police forces.
In Tanzania, they are popularly known as sungusungu, and in some areas they have been praised by the police and even given rewards for making the streets safer.
Sungusungu was born among the Sukuma tribe of the northwestern Mwanza and Shinyanga regions in the early 1980s as a grass-roots response to cattle rustlers armed with weapons left over from the war with Uganda.
Authorities in Dar es Salaam are now considering formalizing the groups in the city as crime fighters.
"They are doing a good job," said one senior detective. "There is no way the police have enough numbers to be everywhere at all times."
According to one report, city officials are considering giving the groups legal backing.
"We want to make sure each district, each ward and each locality has trained militia ... and these will be making patrols as scheduled," said Athuman Mdoe, a district commissioner of Ilala district.
Some residents say that will just give police the extra task of policing the militias. A night guard at a primary school in coastal Tanga was killed by vigilantes who believed robbers had taken refuge inside the building and attacked the man and his teenage son in just one recent case of apparent mistaken identity.
But some senior police officers are convinced sungusungu can make a vital contribution.
Maganzo village people's militia in Shinyanga was recently given a cow, 10 torches, 48 batteries and 50,000 Tanzanian shillings (about US$50) for helping catch robbers.
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