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Mthembu (H M)

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No photograph available — remembrance poppy
Identity
Person No.
32071
Service No.
95737672
Last Name
First Name
Unknown
Initials
H M
Date of Birth
Unknown
Est. Birth Year
Age at Death
Unknown
Death Record
Date of Death
Cause code
SUIC 386
Suicide
Cause of Death
Committed Suicide, shot himself at Newcastle
Military Service
Branch
Air Force
Rank
Corporal
Regiment
Unknown
Defence Force
SANDF 1,026
South African National Defence Force
Memorial
Memorial
Location
On a koppie at the Voortrekker Monument, overlooking Pretoria
Address
Coordinates
Panel
Not listed against a numbered panel
On the panel
Position on the panel will be added with photographs
Unit History
Role at time of death
Airborne light infantry (paratroops)
Status
Regular Force
Part of
Still the SANDF’s only full-time parachute battalion. 44 Parachute Brigade was downsized to 44 Parachute Regiment in 1999.
Notes

Ref SANDF 1998 RoH

Research notes


25 Sep 2026, Unit2 service-branch sweep: the stored Secondary Unit "Air Force" was CLEARED as a duplicate. It was not a sub-unit, it was a service-branch word repeating what the Branch column already says. Secondary Unit is for sub-units -- a company, a squadron, a commando -- and this record's branch of service is unchanged at "Air Force".
Database-wide FirstName/Age/Unit contamination sweep, 28 Sep 2026 (John's hypothesis, tested and confirmed on 3 sample groups before running at scale): FirstName 'Sambonga', Age 28 and Unit '1 Parachute Battalion' were forward-filled from PersonNumber 32070 down a contiguous run of 2 records -- this record's own LastName ('Mthembu'), Initials ('H M'), ServiceNo ('95737672') and DateDeath ('1998-12-27') are all genuinely distinct from every other record in the run, confirming a different real person whose FirstName/Age/Unit were simply never captured (source pattern consistent with a SAPS memorial table using rowspan for Name/Age/Province, mis-copied by the scraper onto every row). FirstName, Age and Unit CLEARED; no replacement guessed. CauseDeath NOT touched -- it follows its own, narrower sub-block boundaries within this run and carries real distinguishing information.
CORRECTION, 28 Sep 2026: the earlier note on this record wrongly described Unit as forward-filled/contaminated alongside FirstName and Age. On review, Unit values proved to be common, genuinely correct data shared by many unrelated real people throughout this dataset (e.g. 'Western Cape' alone appears on 195 scattered, unrelated records with 111 distinct surnames) -- Unit was NOT part of this contamination and has been RESTORED from the pre-sweep backup. FirstName and Age remain correctly cleared -- both were 100% correlated across every contaminated run and independently confirmed absent on SAWGP's own record for spot-checked samples.

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