Johannesburg - Police Minister Bheki Cele announced that more suspects had been brought in by the police in connection with the brutal murder of 17-year-old Palesa Malatji.
Cele said initially, police collected six people, but as they were interviewing them, they realised they had to collect four more.
According to the police minister, the forensics people were at the crime scene, where they collected DNA evidence and further samples taken from people interviewed by the police.
"We know them, so instead of detaining them, we wanted to make sure that some of them were linked to that. I was speaking to the police, and they are busy with those samples in different laboratories."
"It's an involved process where you just don't get DNA from them and have something to match with. We have to go and hand over the DNA from the crime scene and get their DNA and separate it from any other DNA that could be there because DNA is a sensitive thing as one could go there innocently, so we need to eliminate all those that could have been there and match those who are suspects."
Cele said the police had brought in some boys who attended the same school as Malatji for her rape and murder, which was an emotional moment for him.
As he said, the quarterly crime statistics he issued revealed that in three months, 10 000 women had been raped, and 64% of them were raped by fathers, uncles, and even siblings.
"It's a situation where we just don't know how to begin dealing with this. Maybe the time has come that we speak to men because the police can arrest, the courts can keep you there, but if we don't speak to men, then we may not be able to curb that."
Cele said this was the case with the Malatji murder, as information had pointed the police to collect some of her fellow learners.
"The time has come to speak to the individual conscience of all of us, especially the men; we need to speak harder to say this can't be the way of life."
Malatji's sexually assaulted body was found last Friday near the Echibini Secondary School in Soshanguve after she failed to return home from attending extra classes on Thursday afternoon.
The Star