According to newspaper reports recently unearthed by several rights groups in South Africa, murders of South African whites are being disguised by issuing death certificates showing that they had died of “natural causes”. At least three such cases have come to light.

In a brutal murder, auto-electrician Henry Locke (41) was shot through the heart in front of his whole family on 5 October 2009. Afterwards, the ANC-controlled state issued a death certificate stating that he had died of “natural causes”.

Commenting on the certificate, published in the Johannesburg daily Beeld on 30 October 2009, his wife Amanda Locke (43) expressed shock, saying: “On the contrary, he was shot dead right in front of us, before our very eyes.” (Beeld archive here.)

“They did not say anything. They just shot him dead. On the spot where he was shot, he fell and died.

“How can the murder case continue if the death certificate states that he died of natural causes?

“It is impossible that he could have died of natural causes. It simply cannot be.”

Mr. Locke was shot in the heart on the Elands game farm near Cullinan, northeast of Pretoria, in front of his daughter, Monique (13) and son Dawie (23), a paraplegic. According to Mrs. Locke, the government officials told her that the bullet hitting her husband’s heart had caused a heart attack, therefore the cause was “natural”.

When the Beeld reporter contacted Mr. Ronnie Mamoepa, the spokesman for the Department of Home Affairs, he told her that he was “certain that the information on the death certificate was wrong” and that “the mistake would definitely be corrected”. To date, there has been no news of any correction.

After the publication of the report in Beeld, another case came to light. A woman writing under the name of “Elsabé” in the letters column on 30 October 2009 stated the following:

“In reaction to the report ‘Is being shot in the heart a “natural cause”?’ on the late Mr. Henry Locke, I wish to mention that my husband was shot on 14 July in the house where we lived on a smallholding in Raslouw in what was presumably an armed robbery.

“His death certificate, too, states that he died ‘of natural causes’.

“My impression is that such ‘mistakes’ are committed deliberately (to falsify statistics?) or it could be simply lazy officials.

“In a previous letter to Beeld I had stated that the crime mentioned on my husband’s police docket was ‘domestic robbery’.

“The report of the post-mortem is still not available, after three months.

“Such mistakes are pointed out in the media, but alas – nothing happens afterwards.

“We must realise that we are at the mercy of the elements.”

A third case took an even bizarre turn when a man initially thought to have been killed by a buffalo was shown to have been stabbed to death. This case was mentioned in the Beeld on 6 October 2009, so three such cases were reported within one month.

Mr. Roy Munks (65) of Dunnottar near Springs on the East Rand was wounded in the neck, damaging his artery. He was presumed to have had a heart attack due to the shock of being gouged by a buffalo.

However, two suspected robbers were being questioned the previous week when they admitted during the interrogation that they had been a party to Munks’s death. The men, whose names were withheld by police, were charged with murder and held.

The results of the post mortem on Munks found that he had bled to death after being gouged by the buffalo. The wounds on his body “were commensurate with the wounds possibly caused by a buffalo’s horns”. The police now believe that Munks was stabbed with knives because the attackers wanted to rob his farmhouse.

None of these stories was published in the English-language media of South Africa. A thorough search of fhe names and dates returned no results.