by Nurat Uthman
A white South African farmer and two of his workers were in court Friday accused of murdering two Black women and feeding their remains to pigs, shocking the country.
Zachariah Olivier, 60, and workers Andrian De Wet, 19, and William Musora, 45, a Zimbabwean national, are facing murder charges after the decomposing bodies were discovered in a pigsty on a farm in the northern province of Limpopo on August 20.
Police began investigating after 44-year-old Maria Makgatho was reported missing after visiting the farm on August 17. She was accompanied by Locadia Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean national aged 35.
The trio was arrested on August 21.
It is alleged that a food truck dumped “potentially expired goods, prompting the deceased… to trespass onto the farm to collect these goods,” the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said in a statement.
The accused “allegedly fired several shots at the victims, resulting in the deaths of the two women and injuries to a surviving male individual,” the NPA said.
The man crawled to the main road and managed to get help, it said. The case was postponed to September 10 and the accused would remain in custody, the NPA said.
The killings caused outrage in South Africa, which suffers from a high crime rate with homicides among the highest in the world.
Dozens protested outside the magistrate’s court at Mankweng, a town about 350 kilometers or 217 miles northeast of Johannesburg to demand that the accused be refused bail.
