South African police found a tenth body in Ekurhuleni on Saturday, east of Johannesburg, deepening a crisis that has now stretched across ten weeks without police confirming whether one perpetrator or several are responsible. The semi-naked body was found near a cemetery in Tembisa; provincial police chief Tommy Mthombeni said the victim appeared to have been stoned to death, with a post-mortem to follow.
The nine earlier victims were found across Kempton Park, Olifantsfontein, KwaThema and Dawn Park since mid-July, most in their 20s and 30s, several stripped and showing signs of sexual assault. Three suspects — a man and two women — appeared in the Boksburg Magistrates’ Court this week in connection with the ninth victim, in what local reporting described as the first real breakthrough after two months of largely unsolved cases. Parts of KwaThema and Nigel remain under localised lockdown with increased police visibility.
The scale of the response has grown alongside the death toll. South Africa’s Inter-Ministerial Committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide approved what it called a Comprehensive Emergency Strategy last weekend, elevating the multidisciplinary investigative team to be coordinated directly by the Deputy National Commissioner for Detective Services. Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga also disclosed a detail that had gone largely unreported: of the ten bodies recovered, one still has no missing person’s case attached to it — nobody has yet come forward to say who she was. The government is urging anyone with a missing female relative in the area to report it immediately, without the usual 24-hour wait.
Politically, the case has become entangled with South Africa’s approaching local elections. The Democratic Alliance has offered a R500,000 reward on top of police’s own 400,000 rand offer, and has formally requested Parliament debate the crisis, with DA police spokesperson Lisa Schickerling arguing the killings are “part of a devastating cycle that demands urgent action” from government at every level. The ANC’s own condemnation of the killings was met with public accusations of performative timing ahead of the vote.
Underneath the immediate investigation sits a longer-running legal gap. Amnesty International South Africa used the case last week to renew its call for femicide — the gender-motivated killing of a woman because she is a woman — to be recognised as a distinct crime under South African law. It currently is not, which Amnesty argues leaves the targeted killing of women prosecuted the same as any other murder, with no separate charge that names the pattern for what it is.
That pattern is already reflected in the country’s numbers. The national GBV Command Centre logged 6,782 distress calls between 1 and 16 September — an average of 424 a day, up 21% from August. President Cyril Ramaphosa declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster in November 2025; ten months on, Ekurhuleni is the case testing whether that declaration carries any operational weight, in a country that already averages more than 60 killings of any kind every day.
Anyone with information can contact the SAPS Crime Stop line on 08600 10111, or reach South Africa’s GBV Command Centre on 0800 428 428. Afrikeye has also covered the strain on SAPS’s murder investigation capacity amid the country’s broader violent crime numbers this year, and continues to track South Africa’s governance and public safety record.
