Tenth woman’s body found as South Africa police probe killings

Police in South Africa have discovered another body in Ekurhuleni, to the east of Johannesburg, bringing the number of women found dead there in recent months to 10.

The body was found on Saturday morning and was identified by the friend with whom she had been at a bar the previous evening.

The local police commissioner said his force could not rule out the possibility that there was a serial killer on the loose, noting similarities across the 10 deaths in Ekurhuleni, as well as another in Soweto.

The deaths have sparked a national outcry about the scale of violence against women in the country, which has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world.

The latest body was discovered at a cemetery in the Tembisa neighbourhood north-east of central Johannesburg.

Police issued a statement a short while later saying crime scene investigators were at the scene gathering evidence. Officials have yet to publicly identify the victim.

The woman’s friend told national broadcaster SABC that she recognised her friend’s clothes from the previous night when shown a picture of the body.

“I don’t know what I’m going to say to her children,” she said while wiping away tears. “It’s painful.”

Gauteng Police Commissioner Tommy Mthombeni said that, at this early stage in the investigation, it was too soon to say whether the woman’s death was linked to the others.

He told reporters that the other bodies shared a “similar victimology” that indicated a shared “modus operandi” of killing, which would allow police to determine whether this latest death was linked to the others.

“For now, it’s not something which we can overrule to say there’s a serial killer, but we cannot conclusively indicate as such,” Lt Gen Mthombeni said.

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates, with 5,427 people murdered between April and June this year alone.

But it is the nature of the recent killings around Johannesburg that has left many women there reeling from the growing death toll.

The 10 other bodies have been found in similar circumstances to one another since July. Most of them were found in Kempton Park, one neighbourhood over from Tembisa.

Many of the bodies were those of young women and almost all had suffered extreme violence prior to their deaths.

The deaths have increased pressure on the national government less than a year after ministers declared gender-based violence a national disaster.

While South African police statistics do not differentiate victims by gender, the South African Human Rights Commission said last week that 569 women were killed and 1,052 others survived attempted murder between April and June this year.

Three men appeared in court earlier this week accused of being involved in one of the nine prior murders, with police working to track down others who may have been involved.