The police ministry says that the DNA of more than 9,000 unidentified people was found at crime scenes across the country.
This came to light as the South African Police Service (SAPS) worked on reducing its DNA analysis backlog from 240,000 to 71,000 cases in six months.
The backlog has led to delays in many court cases across the country which require DNA results to proceed.
Police Minister Bheki Cele says police are searching for 9,234 people who have been identified through DNA analysis to ongoing crime investigations.
“People we have not found but we know that we have their DNA in our bank, which will be easy to link those people the day there are found,” Minister Cele said.
With about 71,000 DNA analysis results still outstanding, Cele said that he expected the number to grow.
Meanwhile, the minister said that over 15,000 people had been positively linked to ongoing investigations through DNA testing.
“There is not a very high number sometimes of people that rape people. There are people that are repeat offenders, so DNA does help to link several offenders in quite several cases,” the minister said.
He said that reducing the DNA backlog was one of the government’s major objectives in dealing with the country’s gender-based violence and femicide crisis.
-EWN
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