Mass graves suspected to be Ethiopian migrants found in Malawi

AFP|LILONGWE: Malawi’s government has found a mass grave in the north of the country containing the remains of 25 people suspected of being migrants from Ethiopia, police said on Wednesday.

“This grave was found late on Tuesday, but we sealed off the area and started exhuming it today. So far, we have found 25 bodies,” police spokesman Peter Kalaya told AFP.

The police were informed by villagers in Mzimba, about 250 km north of the capital Lilongwe, who fell over the grave while collecting honey from a forest.

“We suspect that they were illegal migrants who were headed to South Africa via Malawi,” said police spokesman Peter Kalaya.

He added that evidence gathered from the scene showed that the people who were killed were Ethiopian men between the ages of 25 and 40 years old.

The police said that the recovered bodies were placed in the morgue for examination.

“The bodies appear to have been buried probably not more than a month ago,” added the police spokesman.

Malawi is a popular transit point for illegal immigrants from East Africa who are trafficked to South Africa — the continent’s most industrialized country — and poor immigrants from other parts of the continent.

The police often arrest trucks carrying migrants on their way to South Africa, via Mozambique.

The police spokesperson, Kalaya, said that between January and September of this year, they arrested 221 migrants, 186 of whom were Ethiopians.

Two years ago, immigration authorities in Mozambique conducted a shocking investigation, finding 64 migrants from Ethiopia dead in a container on a truck.