Police divers recover body after seven-day search in Crocodile River Gorge

MATSULU – According to Capt Pottie Potgieter, of the SAPS Inland Water-policing and Diving Services, the swimmer, a 25-year-old Mozambican citizen, Judiao Ricardo Zunguza, was with a group of people socialising on the bank of the river above the weir last Sunday.

Witnesses said the man went for a swim below the weir. The last time he was seen, he was resting on a sandbank.

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At around 16:00 the group realised he was gone, so they called the police. The divers were sent out to search for him. Potgieter said they dove for more than an hour on that Sunday before it got too dark to see anything.

“We searched everywhere around the weir where the body could have been washed to, but after dark, it got too dangerous.

Also, in that area, there are crocodiles and hippos that pose a threat to us.
“We went back every day and walked and swam the river for two kilometres, looking for him. In some areas the going was very rough. At one stage it took four hours to cover just one kilometre.” Potgieter says the whole search team was bitten by ticks and there were a couple of serious bee stings as well.

“Members of the Off-Road Rescue Unit (ORRU) assisted, and that made a huge difference to how much ground we could cover. Two ORRU members used drones to cover the search area from higher in the air. We even had the SAPS Airwing’s Pilatus fixed-wing aircraft involved at one stage.”

They searched an area of eight kilometres below the weir to make sure the body was recovered.
The body was finally recovered Saturday afternoon, downstream from the weir, stuck between rocks. The divers had to swim to the body for the recovery.

Because of the inaccessibility of the area, the body had to be recovered with a system of ropes and pullies. The recovery process itself took just over an hour.

“This was the toughest search I have ever been involved in. People often ask us how long we typically search for a body. The answer is we do not stop looking. We will find the body. We do not give up. This recovery took seven days, but we would have kept on looking.”

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