The media was told that slain police Constable Francis Rasuge’s remains had been positively identified before her family, her brother Edward Rasuge said on Tuesday.
“To be honest with you, we were very much hurt,” he told 567 CapeTalk radio.
“Immediately, when someone reported about the human bones at the house, we believe they should have come to us and said this is what we have, we are going to search and then they will come back to us.”
Rasuge said journalists showed him an e-mail from the police on Monday stating that a DNA test had confirmed that the remains discovered at a house in Temba, outside Pretoria, were those of his sister.
Rasuge told the radio station he did not really know her killer, William Nkuna.
“I’m not the kind of guy who would intervene in my sister’s affairs.”
However, he had been affected by Nkuna’s denial of the murder.
“I cried to hear him telling lies, showing no remorse for what he did, denying everything that he’s done.”
Rasuge laid to rest
Rasuge’s remains are to be returned to her family so they can lay her to rest.
Construction workers found the bones while laying a foundation at Nkuna’s house on March 20. The police’s K9 Unit and the forensic laboratory later uncovered several bones, including a skull.
Rasuge went missing on August 27 2004. She was last seen alive with Nkuna outside a hairdressing salon in Temba.
Judge Ronald Hendricks sentenced Nkuna, in the Mmabatho Circuit Court sitting in Ga-Rankuwa, to life imprisonment in November 2005, even though her body had not been found.
A few weeks after Nkuna was sentenced, David Cornelius (35), who purported to be a friend of Nkuna’s, claimed he knew where Rasuge was buried and led police to a grave. The body that was exhumed turned out to be that of an older woman buried long before Rasuge’s disappearance.
In 2007, the garage of Nkuna’s house was dug up, revealing nothing, after a sangoma claimed to have had a vision which revealed that Rasuge’s remains were buried underneath a garage at a private property.
Police also used three search dogs at the property, none of which responded positively to signs of human remains. — Sapa