Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Body found in river probed
Tests may hold key to kidnap saga
POLICE forensic experts are conducting DNA tests to determine if the badly decomposed body accidentally found by a fisherman in the Tugela River is Kenilworth resident Rod Saunders.
“No conclusive findings have been made yet,” said Hawks spokesperson Captain Lloyd Ramovha. “But we can confirm that DNA samples have been taken and sent to Pretoria for analysis to establish if the body is linked to the Saunders kidnap case.
“Investigators have also visited all morgues in the search area to determine if there are any other unidentified bodies that fit the time frame of the case,” he said.
Saunders, 74, and his wife, Rachel, 63, were abducted by Islamic State (IS)-linked suspects from a remote KwaZuluNatal forest on February 10.
The Cape Town-based British botanists who own the indigenous seed supplier, Silverhill Seeds, in Kenilworth have been missing ever since.
Initially, police were convinced that the couple had been kidnapped and murdered in Ngoye Forest Reserve near Mtunzini just 130km north of Durban. But in spite of regular, intensive searches with tracker dogs and helicopters and a combined investigation involving the FBI and British police, they remained missing.
The arrest on February 15 of two prime IS-linked sus- pects, Sayfydeen Aslam Del Vecchio ( 38), and his wife, Fatima Patel (27), yielded incriminating evidence about the couple’s demise but shed no light on where their bodies were dumped. Neither did the arrest of a third suspect, Thembamandla Xulu (19), for possession of the Saunders’s cellphones.
But police did get a breakthrough in late March when they finally nailed Malawian Ahmad Jackson Mussa, aka Bazooka, in Durban North following an intensive five-week manhunt. He co-operated and guided their search to the Tugela River Mouth.
But a search party involving boats and divers failed to find their bodies, which were believed to be submerged, wrapped in their sleeping bags.
Then a few weeks ago, said a source close to the investigation, the Hawks were alerted that an unidentified body lying in the Kwadukuza Mortuary in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, could be linked to the hunt for the Saunders couple.
Badly decomposed, it had been found on February 28 about 500m from the Tugela River Mouth by a fisherman. But police who removed it did not link it to the Hawks search being conducted 60km north.
Del Vecchio, Patel and Xulu have since appeared several times in the Verulam Magistrate’s Court. Damning evidence documented in an affidavit incriminates them in a R700 000 credit card spending spree and an ATM ransack of Rachel’s FNB account.
Incriminating text messages also indicate that the senior couple were a target for an IS-motivated hunt, abduction and killing. The affidavit also linked Bazooka to Del Vecchio, who messaged him “that there is an elderly couple in the forest, that it is a good hunt” .