Two graves, believed to contain the remains of the ”Mamelodi 10”, were exhumed at the Winterveldt cemetery, north-west of Pretoria, on Monday by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to commemorate national Human Rights Day.
The ”Mamelodi 10” were 10 youngsters abducted in June 1986 by the apartheid government’s security police. They were injected with a chemical substance and placed in a minibus. The bus was then doused with petrol and set alight.
The Winterveldt exhumations follow an order by President Thabo Mbeki in April 2003 to finalise missing-persons cases that arose from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The TRC was established to investigate apartheid-era crimes and human rights abuses.
Two other exhumations have already been carried out by the NPA. On March 9 this year, the priority crimes litigation unit of the NPA closed the case of Umkhonto weSizwe cadres Jabulani Ndaba and Oscar Maleka, who died during a skirmish with security police at Mpumalanga township, near KwaZulu-Natal’s Hammersdale, in 1988.
Their bodies were exhumed in Pietermaritzburg, forensically confirmed to be those of the freedom fighters and officially handed over to their families.
A forensic investigation is also being conducted into the exhumation of two bodies at Piet Retief on March 14.
The NPA will continue exhumations at Winterveldt until they have recovered the remains of at least 18 activists killed by the then Northern Transvaal Security Branch in 1986 and 1987, NPA spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said.
”Some of the bodies were placed on top of explosives and blown into pieces, with the remains later buried at the cemetery,” Nkosi said. — Sapa