Mass burial of unclaimed bodies of Stilfontein illegal miners begins

The North West government has started with mass burials of the unclaimed bodies of illegal miners recovered from the old Stilfontein mine in January.

The mass burials started today. "The bodies have been in the mortuary for a very long time now, and the law does permit us to keep them for 30 days, said provincial department of health spokesperson Lucas Mothibedi.

“The bodies we are burying are the ones we are certain that families are not coming through anytime soon, and we need to make space for other bodies. We have been calling families to come forward and nothing yet. It has been four or five months and we do not have hope they will come but we extracted DNA so that at a later stage if someone comes then we are able to check if they match.”

The provincial department of health's director of media and communications Tebogo Lekgethwane said so far, 25 of the 78 bodies that were recovered during the rescue operation have been identified and released to families.

The families are from Mozambique, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, he said.

However,  as of Tuesday, 30 bodies that have not been claimed would be buried, said Lekgethwane. “There are currently 53 bodies at [a] Klerksdorp mortuary [who are] unclaimed. We bury them as unclaimed persons," he said.

Lekgethwane said the remaining 23 will be buried by the end of June or the beginning of July. It is expected that all the bodies would be buried by the end of July.

Mothibedi said they were working with local municipalities and that the bodies would either be buried in Rustenburg or Madibeng municipalities  

North West police spokesperson Brig Sabata Mokgwabone said families were still allowed to come forward for DNA samples but not for identification of the bodies. “We will do a comparison of the DNA samples but because of the state of the decomposition of the bodies, it is going to be difficult to allow anyone to identify them,” he said.

“Their graves will be marked so that if anyone comes forward and they are positively linked, then we know where to find their bodies. The process will not stop. So, anyone is still allowed to come forward.”  

Since the police's Operation Vala Umgodi, 1,826 illegal miners were arrested at the old Buffelsfontein gold mine in Stilfontein. Of these, 1,128 are from Mozambique, 473 from Zimbabwe, 197 from Lesotho, 26 from SA, and one each from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi.

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