TSHIVHASE - The Pan Africanist Congress in Limpopo has urged the Special Task Team to speed up their process of investigating the alleged ritual murder cases in the Tshivhase area.

This was said during the honouring of the late Tendani Victor Lukhwareni during a function held at Ngwenani Primary School on Saturday of April 19. Lukhwareni, a former PAC, SANDF member and also leader of Tshivhase Youth Committee, was gunned down on April 18 2002, while he was walking to his home at Ngwenani.

His death came hardly five days after he led a protest march by the community to the area commissioner's office, demanding for the arrest of suspected ritual murderers in the area.

Lukhwareni also informed the police on many occasions about the alleged plan by the suspected people on the cases, who wanted to kill him. During his honouring function, PAC leader Maxwell Nemadzivhanani said Lukhwareni would still be alive if the government did not fail in its duty to provide security to the citizens.

PAC's provincial secretary Nicholas Dangale said they would not stop fighting against the killings of people in the area.

"If police are failing, the community will not fail to protect itself from the murderers," said Dangale. Dangale challenged the Special Task Team, which was appointed to take over the cases from the local police early this month, to speed up their process of finalising the cases.

Earlier on, the Tshivhase Crisis Committee together with the community led several protest marches demanding that all ritual murder cases in their areas be removed from the local police and given to the Scorpions.

The community said they wanted the cases to be removed because they believed that some of the local police were bribed, which is the reason why the cases were withdrawn against some of the suspects because of lack of information. Dir Mzamani Ngobeni informed the committee about the decision of the appointment of the special task team last week Thursday in the area office, Sibasa.

Supt Johannes Fourie, who is the leader of the seven-member team, which started working on the cases on Thursday, was introduced to the committee. Although the community welcomed the move, Avhatakali Nethononda, a leader of the Tshivhase Youth Committee said they still wanted the Scorpions to come and investigate the cases as they had indicated before.