South African investigators on Monday began exhuming the bodies of teenage anti-apartheid activists who were killed nearly 20 years ago, allegedly on their way to Botswana for guerrilla training.
The so-called "Mamelodi Ten" -- a group of black boys aged between 14 and 19 -- were killed by security agents from the apartheid regime in June 1986 near the northern town of Zeerust, according to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"We have exhumed three bodies in the so-called Mamelodi Ten and in the next few days we are going to exhume the other seven," National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Makhosini Nkosi told reporters.
The bodies were exhumed at Winterveldt Cemetery, northwest of Pretoria, as part of the government's effort to uncover the fate of hundreds of anti-apartheid activists who went missing between 1960 and 1994.
According to the report of the commission, an agent acting for the apartheid government collected the 10 youths and drove them towards the Botswana border in June 1986, at the height of apartheid repression.
"Their trousers were removed and injected with a sedative or other chemical substance," the TRC report said.
The vehicle carrying the youths was left to roll down a steep hill, slammed into a wall and was blown up.
The National Prosecuting Authority was tasked by President Thabo Mbeki in April 2003 to fin-alize investigations into the whereabouts of the disappeared anti-apartheid struggle victims.
The project arose out of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which, during its amnesty hearings from 1996 to 2003, unearthed information on the assassination of anti-apartheid activists.
Earlier this month two bodies of the African National Congress's military wing, Mkonto weSizwe, were exhumed from a cemetery in Pietermaritzburg, near Durban.
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