A 35-year-old man appeared in the Ermelo Magistrate’s Court on Monday after he allegedly stole a corpse from a local mortuary and had sex with it, Mpumalanga police said.
The man faces charges of breaking and entering, theft and violation of the body of a dead person, said Superintendent Abie Khoabane. His case was postponed to August 14 and he was remanded into police custody.
”Police acted on a tip-off and went to an abandoned house behind the mortuary where we found the body. The suspect dragged the body out from the mortuary on Thursday evening to the [abandoned] house,” said Khoabane. ”A post-mortem conducted on her revealed that the suspect did have sexual intercourse with her.”
The man was arrested after community members led police to his house, not far from the mortuary.
The woman’s body was taken to Siza Funeral Services at 11am on Thursday after she died of natural causes. On Friday morning, an employee discovered that the mortuary had been broken into and that her body was missing.
Three other bodies, including that of the woman’s husband who died last week — also of natural causes — were still in the mortuary. — Sapa