Seven women found dead in Ekurhuleni as top police and ministers meet in Parktown

Seven women have been found dead in Ekurhuleni, and the country’s top police and government leaders met in Parktown on Tuesday night to be briefed on the investigation into how they died.

The delegation at the SAPS Gauteng provincial office included Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia, Women Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga, Deputy Police Minister Polly Boshielo, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi and Acting National Police Commissioner Puleng Dimpane, eNCA reported.

The seventh body

The seventh case was added to the investigation after a woman’s body was found floating in a river in Clayville, near the Mall of Tembisa, on 7 September.

That discovery was reported hours after police found the body of a sixth woman, believed to be in her thirties, beside a road in KwaThema, Springs, on the morning of 8 September. That body was in an advanced state of decomposition.

What police say they know

South African Police Service spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe said investigators are still working through the evidence and the profiles of the victims before they can say whether the deaths are linked.

That is the honest position of the investigation. Police have not said the cases are connected. They have not named a suspect. They have not said whether they are looking for one person or more than one.

What they have asked for is patience, and information. The service has appealed to the public for clues, and the appeal is the practical part of this story. Somebody saw something, and the police have said so.

What it means for people living there

For women in KwaThema, Tembisa, Clayville and the surrounding townships, the practical effect is a stretch of weeks in which bodies have been found in public places and no arrest has been announced. That is a hard thing to carry, and it is the reason the briefing was called at the level it was.

The presence of the Women Minister and the Premier at a police briefing is not routine. It signals that the provincial and national arms of government are treating the sequence of deaths as a matter that reaches beyond a single station’s caseload.

The state’s response

Gauteng has the country’s largest concentration of police resources, and the province’s serious and violent crime units are built for exactly this kind of work. The task now is to turn evidence into an arrest, and the meeting on Tuesday night was convened to hear how far that work has gone.

The SAPS has not released a timeline for when it expects to conclude the linking analysis. Until it does, the families of the seven women are waiting on a phone call, and the communities where the bodies were found are watching the roads they use every day.

The Enquirer has asked the SAPS Gauteng provincial office for the number of detectives assigned to the cases, whether a task team has been established, and when the service expects to complete the victim profiling. We will report the answer.

Source: eNCA, High-level delegation meets over discovery of seven women’s bodies in Gauteng