A decade after the families of the Mamelodi 10 buried nine of the youngsters who were killed in 1986, they again gathered at the Winterveld cemetery, north of Pretoria, to witness the exhumation of the 10th body on Thursday.
The teenagers were lured to their deaths in a joint operation by apartheid security forces on June 26 that year.
Security police agent Joe Mamasela collected the teenagers in a minibus, pretending to be an MK member. They were burnt to death and their bodies found by locals. They were subsequently buried as unidentified paupers in Windterveld.
The families of the 10 assumed they had gone into exile, but the teenagers never returned and their fate was unknown.
It was only during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) amnesty processes in the 1990s that the families learnt the truth about what had happened.
Eight operatives from SADF Special Forces and Northern and Western Transvaal Security Branches applied for and were granted amnesty for the operation by the TRC.
The National Prosecuting Authority's (NPA) missing persons task team managed to trace and recover nine of the 10 bodies at Winterveld cemetery. They were reburied in a special ceremony in Mamelodi in 2009.
The discovery of the 10th body was made possible this year after the missing persons task team used a drone to map the cemetery in photographic strips, which were then knitted together with advanced software to create a high-resolution photographic map.
This map was then used to isolate areas for further investigation and excavation.
