Twenty-five dead bodies of people whom the police suspect were illegal immigrants, were on Wednesday found around Golong’ondo area within Mtangatanga Forest Reserve in Mzimba, just 50 metres off the Mzimba-Mzalangwe Road.

In an interview on Wednesday, National Police spokesperson Peter Kalaya said they were waiting for postmortem results to establish the cause of death.

He said: “We received a tip-off from the community that they saw dead bodies in the forest. Our officers rushed to the scene and found 25 corpses.

“Our friends in the health sector will conduct postmortem and the results are likely to take time. So, until then, we may not know what killed them.”

Kalaya said from their preliminary assessment, the dead bodies look like male adults.

Prisoners exhuming the bodies on Wednesday

He, however, said that may be confirmed later.

Said Kalaya: “We suspect that the 25 were illegal immigrants. We found a picture and a document which we are analysing to know where they came from.

“Between January and September this year, we intercepted 221 illegal immigrants. Out of these, 186 were Ethiopians, 17 were from the Democratic Republic of Congo, 17 from Bangladesh and one from Pakistan.”

Group village head Golong’ondo said a young man discovered the dead bodies while hunting insects in the forest.

“We see  many immigrants in the forest and sometimes we report such incidents to the police. When children go into the forest to pluck mushrooms or hunt insects, they sometimes meet these people,” he said.

Department t of Immigration and Citizenship Services national spokesperson Pasqually Zulu said they have already deported 191 illegal immigrants this year.

He also said 198 illegal immigrants are at Mzuzu Prison and 178 in other facilities.

“We cannot manage to keep all of them in prisons because it will drain resources. So, we engaged the Ethiopian Government to repatriate their citizens,” he said.

During a rally in Karonga District in April this year, President Lazarus Chakwera warned that his administration will deal with anyone aiding and abetting illegal immigrants.

The post 25 dead bodies found in Mzimba forest appeared first on The Nation Online.