LILONGWE, Malawi
Malawi has discovered a mass grave in the north of the country containing the remains of 25 people suspected to be migrants from Ethiopia, police said on Wednesday.
"The grave was discovered
late on Tuesday but we cordoned it off and started exhuming today. So far, we
have discovered 25 bodies," police spokesman Peter Kalaya said.
Police were alerted by
villagers in the Mzimba area, about 250 kilometres north of the capital
Lilongwe, who stumbled on the grave while collecting wild honey in a forest.
"We suspect that they
were illegal migrants who were being transported to South Africa via
Malawi," he said.
He added that evidence
gathered from the site indicated the victims were Ethiopian males aged between
25 and 40 years.
The decomposing bodies were
exhumed and taken to a morgue for autopsy.
The bodies appear to have been
buried "probably not more than a month" ago, he said.
Malawi is a popular route for
illegal immigrants from East Africa being smuggled to South Africa -- the
continent's most industrialised country and a magnet for poor migrants from
elsewhere on the continent.
Police often catch trucks transporting
migrants passing through the country en route to South Africa, via Mozambique.
Kalaya said that between
January and September this year, authorities had intercepted 221 illegal
immigrants, 186 of whom were Ethiopians.
Two years ago immigration authorities
in neighbouring Mozambique made a grim discovery, finding 64 migrants from
Ethiopia dead inside a freight container loaded on a truck.
They were presumed to have
died from suffocation. A few survivors were among the group.
The International Organization
for Migration (IOM) chief in Malawi Nomagugu Ncube said they were still
gathering information about the latest incident.
"IOM notes with concern
the continued loss of migrants' lives along the migration journey and calls
upon state and non-state actors to work together to promote legal pathways for
migration," she said. - AFP
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