A South African farmer and two of his employees have been accused of killing two women and feeding their bodies to his pigs.
The killings of Maria Makgatho and Locadia Ndlovu, also named in local media as Kudzai Ndlovu, allegedly took place when the two women trespassed on a farm in the northern province of Limpopo in August. They were scavenging for expired dairy products, which local media reported had been left there to feed the pigs.
The farm owner, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, the superviser Andrian Rudolph de Wet and William Musora, an agricultural worker, face two charges of premeditated murder, one of attempted murder and one of possession of an unlicensed firearm. Musora, who is from Zimbabwe, has also been charged with being in South Africa illegally.
The two women were allegedly shot on Olivier’s farm. A third man, who local media reported was Ndlovu’s husband, was injured and crawled to a road where he screamed for help. Some days later, police discovered the women’s decomposing bodies in a pigsty on the farm.
The three accused men appeared in court on Tuesday to apply for bail. The hearing was postponed until October.
The case has caused outrage in a country with high rates of violent crime, where mistreatment and underpayment of farm workers is rife, farmers have been murdered and the majority black population is still mostly excluded from land ownership, as they were under apartheid.
Members of political parties protested outside the court, demanding the harshest possible sentences for the men and for them to be denied bail.
The South African Human Rights Commission, an independent official body, condemned the killings. It said it would “have anti-racism dialogues with the affected communities”, calling on people not to take the law into their own hands.
Associated Press contributed to this story.
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