Cape Town - The NPA’s Missing Persons Task Team may be on the brink of solving a 60-year-old cold case of a former Western Cape prisoner who was sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island.
For nearly six decades, the family of the prisoner has waited for answers of what happened to him and where he may be buried.
The NPA Missing Persons Task team may hold the key.
The team was a recommendation of the TRC and is tasked with finding persons who went missing during political violence between 1960 and 1994.
In the past 17 years, 170 people who went missing during the political instability between 1960 and 1994 have been positively identified thanks to the team of eight which consists of investigators and forensic anthropologists.
The investigations include researching past post-mortems, interviewing witnesses, even perpetrators, exhuming remains and testing bone and tissue DNA to solve their case.
Last week, the NPA commended a team of gravediggers in Durban for their role in retrieving bodies after the floods.
The team is lead by Madeleine Fullard, who said they worked with labs in other countries, like Argentina, to test bone DNA.
“When the TRC closed its work, there were still a lot of disappearances, which were unsolved,” said Fullard. “We are a small task team made up of investigators and forensic anthropologists because we are dealing with very old cases and all the remains are skeletal. Forensic anthropologists specialise in human skeletons.
“We try to trace what happened to people who disappeared and it is a range of disappearances. (They include) people who went missing at the hands of the security forces, people who went into exile and never returned and people who disappeared during political conflict.
“It is different kinds of political violence; anyone who went missing as a result of the conflict of the past.”
Fullard added South Africa was in the early stages of working with bone DNA and therefore used international laboratories when the need arose.
“We have returned them to their families. There are still hundreds more we still have to do and many will not be successful (in locating the remains). We use DNA in one-third of the cases.
“South Africa is very good with soft tissue DNA like bloods and saliva. Bone DNA is a different DNA technology and we are still at the infancy stage here in South Africa. Often the bones, the remains are very disintegrated. We sometimes just have a small fragment that is viable. We have been using a laboratory in Argentina. They have a lot of experience in recovering and identifying skeletal remains.”
She said they were also working on cases in the Western Cape, some of which are top secret and that some testing could take up to a year, while other investigations involve reviewing post-mortems or photographs of unclaimed bodies.
“Laboratory work can take months. Sometimes an extraction fails and there is not much DNA in the bone and a second or third extraction needs to be done. Sometimes we have waited up to a year.
“In other cases, we do not use DNA, where we have good information. For example, there are photographs of the deceased or of the body when it was found. We (also) use other techniques or we have good biological information about the deceased, like unique features, and we are able to match the DNA without using DNA.
“We only do a minority of bone DNA. We are often able to recover post-mortems or the body came into the mortuary as an unknown person, and was buried in a cemetery as an unknown and a post-mortem was conducted and there is a photograph and it was never known how the person died.”
She added that as time passed, cases became more difficult, as witnesses die or records get lost or stolen.
She said repatriation of people who died outside of South Africa’s borders was also under way with government approval.
A case which began in the Western Cape and ended in the Free State is another that Fullard and the team are working on.
The name of the prisoner is known to the Weekend Argus and may not be mentioned due to investigation purposes.
They are hoping to carry out an exhumation soon and give the family closure.
“He was sentenced to prison on the island in the early 1960s and then in 1966 he was transferred to a prison in the Free State and within two months of arriving there, he died.
“The family never knew what happened to his remains (after) they heard he had died. We managed to establish that he was buried as a pauper in Sasolburg in the Free State, and we located a grave. We will do an exhumation with the family and return his remains to them.”
Weekend Argus