White farmers in South Africa in court for murder of two black women

White farmers in South Africa in court for murder of two black women

A white South African farm owner and two of his employees have to answer in court because of the alleged murder of two black women who, according to the prosecutors, shot for trespass last August and whose corpses were fed in pigs. This crime sparked outrage in a nation that already suffers from racial tension.

detailed charges

The women are said to have been killed by Zachariah Olivier, 60 years, as well as his employees Adrian de Wet, 19, and the 45-year-old foreign citizen William Musoro. The three men performed in the Polokwane High Court in the Limpopo province on Monday, a spokesman for the National Public Prosecutor's Office South Africa (NPA) CNN with.

The men see “two charges for murder, attempted murder, three charges for the disability of the judiciary and the possession of firearms and ammunition”, it was said in an earlier Communication The NPA. Musoro, which the police referred to as "illegal immigrants", was also charged with "violations of provisions of the Immigration Act", according to a police statement.

The thwarted process

Before the procedure was postponed to Thursday, the men were not asked to give a plea, said the NPA spokesman in Limpopo, Mashudu Malabi-Dzhangi. The suspect was arrested after police investigations to discover the decayed corpses of the women "in a pigsty on a farm in Sebayeng, outside of Mankweng" on August 20, 2024, said the policy.

incident and survivors

"The investigation began when a 45-year-old South African woman disappeared after visiting the farm on August 17 (2024), accompanied by a 35-year-old foreign woman," reported the police. "Both women suffered gunshot wounds, and a 47-year-old foreign man who was with them", but was also shot and taken to the hospital. The survivor told reporters that one of the murdered women was his wife. The other was her neighbor. They had gone to the farm to collect expired and abandoned dairy products.

public outrage and previous incidents

Many South Africans who are outraged by the murders demand justice for the victims. Similar murders have been recorded in South Africa in recent years. In the Mpumalanga, in the east of the country, there are four men, including a 24-year-old farm manager, because of murder and kidnapping, because they are accused of having killed and burned the corpses of three people who were suspected of sheep theft last August, according to the NPA.

In 2019, a South African Higher Court imposed long-term prison terms against two white farmers because they had thrown a 16-year-old teenager in Coligny in the province of Northwest out of a moving truck, allegedly because of the theft of sunflowers. However, the men were the conviction due to a lack of evidence.

Violent crime is widespread in the South African nation with a little more than 60 million inhabitants, where almost 20,000 murders were registered between April and December of the last year, according to Policedat . Farm mords, in which both white and black South Africans are affected, only make up a small part, about 0.2%, of these killings, although white nationalist groups largely controversial demands on a genocide of white farmers.