NPA team mulls 60-year-old cold case of ex-Robben Island inmate

THE National Prosecuting Authority’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 have 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 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (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 were 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 cases.

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 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, 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.

Fullard added South Africa was in the early stages of working with bone DNA and therefore used international laboratories when the need arose.

“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’ve 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. 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.”

As time passed, cases became more difficult, as witnesses died or records were lost or stolen. Fullard 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 her team are working on. The prisoner’s name is known to the Weekend Argus and may not be mentioned due to investigation purposes.

They hope 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. 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.”