Three women allegedly strapped a dead man to a wheelchair to claim his pension money from the Post Office, Beeld newspaper reported on Wednesday.
”He didn’t look so great,” a witness told the Afrikaans daily.
The women apparently ”borrowed” a wheelchair from the Post Office in Witbank, Mpumalanga and strapped the man by the waist and legs to the wheelchair.
”When the women were told that he did not look very comfortable, the one held the man’s head in her hands but it just fell forward,” said Beeld’s source who did not want to be named.
Post Office clerks refused to hand over the pension money because it was obvious that the man was dead, said the source.
But the women pleaded, saying they did not have money to bury him.
A supervisor then made a print of the corpse’s thumb on a receipt slip and handed the women R960.
The women carried the corpse back to a car and returned the Post Office’s wheelchair.
The incident happened on March 6 and the South African Social Security Agency’s spokesperson, Senzeni Ngubeni, said it was investigating the matter. — Sapa