Tenth woman's body found in South Africa suburb as police probe killings
The deaths have sparked a national outcry about the scale of violence against women in the country.
Tenth woman's body found in South Africa suburb as police probe killings
Police in South Africa say they have discovered a woman's body in a Johannesburg suburb, the tenth in recent months.
The body was found on Saturday morning and identified by the friend she had been with at a bar the previous evening.
The local police commissioner said his force could not rule out the possibility of a serial killer being at large, pointing to similarities among the 10 deaths in Ekurhuleni, as well as another in Soweto.
The killings have triggered a national outcry over the extent 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 found at a cemetery in the Tembisa neighbourhood, north-east of central Johannesburg.
Police later released a statement saying crime scene investigators were at the location collecting evidence. Officials have not yet publicly named the victim.
The woman's friend told national broadcaster SABC that she recognised her friend's clothes from the previous night when she was shown a picture of the body.
"I don't know what I'm going to say to her children," she said, wiping away tears. "It's painful."
Gauteng Police Commissioner Tommy Mthombeni said that, at this early stage of the investigation, it was too soon to determine whether the woman's death was connected to the others.
He told reporters that the other bodies shared a "similar victimology" suggesting a common "modus operandi" of killing, which would help police establish whether this latest death was linked to the rest.
"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 pattern of the recent killings around Johannesburg that has left many women there shaken by the rising death toll.
The 10 other bodies have been found under similar circumstances since July. Most were discovered in Kempton Park, one neighbourhood over from Tembisa.
Many of the bodies were those of young women, and almost all had endured extreme violence before they died.
The deaths have put pressure on the national government less than a year after ministers declared gender-based violence a national disaster.
Although South African police statistics do not separate 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 involvement in one of the nine murders, while police continue working to track down others who may have been involved.