Excavation began on Wednesday at a Canadian landfill site where police believe the bodies of two murdered Indigenous women are buried, the Manitoba provincial government said.
Jeremy Skibicki, 37, was found guilty in July of killing four Indigenous women, whose bodies he is believed to have dumped in various locations.
Two of his victims, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, were raped, killed, dismembered and thrown out with the trash in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Police believe their remains are buried deep inside the Prairie Green landfill.
In a statement, the provincial government said “excavators have begun moving materials above the targeted zone at the landfill.”
“This is about doing the right thing and sending a message to all Manitobans that you matter and deserve dignity. When someone goes missing, we go looking,” said Premier Wab Kinew, who is Indigenous.
Myran’s grandmother, Donna Bartlett, told AFP on Wednesday that she was “happy (the search) is going forward.”
“We’ve been fighting for this for two years now,” she said.
The government said a targeted search of the specific zone where Harris and Myran are believed to be buried is expected to happen later this year.
The partial remains of another victim, Rebecca Contois, were found in two places — a garbage bin in the city and in a separate landfill.
The body of a fourth, unidentified, woman in her 20s, is still missing.
Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met in homeless shelters.
The case was seen by many as a symbol of the dangers faced by Indigenous women in a country where they disproportionately fall victim to violence, termed a “genocide” by a national public inquiry in 2019.
Indigenous women represent about one-fifth of all women killed in gender-related homicides in the country — even though they are just five percent of the female population.