Tenth woman's body found in South Africa suburb as police probe killings

Police in South Africa say that they have discovered a woman's body in a Johannesburg suburb, the tenth in recent months.

Key points

• South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates – with 5, 427 individuals murdered between April and June this year alone.
• The 10 other bodies have been discovered in similar circumstances to one another since July.
• "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 remarked.
• The body was discovered on Saturday morning and identified by the friend with whom she had been at a bar the previous evening.
• The latest body was discovered at a cemetery in the Tembisa neighbourhood north-east of central Johannesburg.

For context, the body was discovered on Saturday morning and identified by the friend with whom she had been at a bar the previous evening.

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

For context, the deaths have sparked a national outcry regarding the scale of violence against women in the country. It has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world.

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

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

Notably, the woman's friend informed 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 remarked while wiping away tears. "It's painful."

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

He remarked to journalists that the other bodies shared a "similar victimology" that indicated a shared "modus operandi" of killing. It would allow police to determine whether this latest death was linked to the others.

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the deaths have placed pressure on the national administration 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 remarked 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 murders, with police working to track down others who may have been involved.

In short, tenth woman' s body found in South Africa suburb as police probe killings is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.