STEVEN MANN, Cape Town | Thursday 2.05pm
THE National Bureau of Missing Persons said on Thursday that the police are winning their battle to try and track down South Africa’s thousands of people who go missing every year.
The bureau was set up in 1994 and since then it has found more than two-thirds of the 12310 people reported to it as missing.
“At the inception [of the bureau] the success rate was 3%,” said bureau head Captain Fanie van Deventer. “We have come a long way.”
At last count in June, police had 3959 missing person cases on their books. Many of them are children who fled their homes because of poverty and domestic abuse.
Thousands of runaways who live on the country’s streets never even make it on to the bureau’s books, but police have found people who disappeared more than a decade ago.
Recently three children who went missing eight years ago were traced to a rural village, Van Deventer said. They had been taken there by their father who had not told anyone what he had done with them.