No timeline for Stilfontein illegal miners’ burials
Updated | By Masechaba Sefularo
The North West Health Department is unable to give timelines for the start of preparations for the state-sponsored burial of unclaimed bodies from the Stilfontein mine incident.

Nearly 80 bodies are being kept at various forensic mortuaries across the province after they were retrieved from an abandoned shaft at the Buffelsfontein gold mine near Klerksdorp in January.
Over 2,000 people have been arrested on charges linked to illicit mining -- while one of the alleged underground ringleaders remains on the run.
Only five families have so far come forward to begin the identification process of the deceased.
The deputy director general for hospital services in the province, Polaki Mokatsane, said they were working closely with police to finalise the process.
He said that it forms part of the criminal investigations.
“Ordinarily, we expect to keep a body for 30 days, which means in that period, we should have done the following up or the tracing of the families with the assistance of the police.”
While 78 bodies were extracted from shaft 11 during the rescue and retrieval operation led by the mine rescue service (MRS), two suspected illegal miners are reported to have died in hospital, bringing the total number of deceased to 80.
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Speaking at a media briefing in Rustenburg on Wednesday, Health MEC Sello Lehari would not clarify if their statistics include the nine bodies that were retrieved by community volunteers in the lead-up to the MRS operation.
At the same time, while there is a raging debate wherein civil society organisations accuse the government of starving the suspected illegal miners to death, Mokatsane said the law prevented them from disclosing the cause of death for any of the deceased miners.
"The inquest act precludes us from disclosing in relation to postmortems. Once we conduct a postmortem as the Department of Health, we hand over all the reports to the police."
Mokatsane also said the fingerprints, DNA samples, images and other identifiers of the deceased are being archived for usage in case family members may come forward after significant time has lapsed, and the government may already have buried the bodies.

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