Gert van Rooyen excavation halted
Forensic investigators have decided to call off their excavation after two days of digging on the north coast, in the hopes of finding the remains of Gert van Rooyen's victims.
The team had been acting on a new lead and descended on Blythedale Beach in KZN, the supposed burial site of the paedophile's victims.
The dig followed a 15-month probe by investigative television programme, Fokus.
Executive producer Alet van Rensburg-Wright says she received a tip-off over the phone.
"I must say it made me very curious and I started investigating. I can confirm some of it had to do with the super-natural, but just a part of it. It started there, and then I went into also the facts and trying to get some confirmation. But what we did find I think is a lot of indication that there is something that we need to investigate. And that is also when the police agreed, because of that, that they would dig," she said.
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Six girls, believed to have kidnapped by Van Rooyen and his partner, Francina Harhoff in the late 1980s, have never been found.
The couple had spent some of their holidays on the KZN north coast.
In 1990, Van Rooyen shot Harhoff dead before turning the gun on himself as police were about to arrest them after one of their victims escaped and told authorities about what had happened to her.