Authorities in Malawi have discovered a mass grave in the north of the country containing the remains of 25 people suspected to be migrants from Ethiopia. “The grave was discovered late on Tuesday but we cordoned it off and started exhuming today. So far, we have discovered 25 bodies,” said a police spokesperson, Peter Kalaya. Police were alerted by villagers in the Mzimba area, about 155 miles (250km) north of the capital, Lilongwe, who had stumbled on the grave while collecting wild honey in a forest. “We suspect that they were illegal migrants who were being transported to South Africa via Malawi,” Kalaya said. He said evidence gathered from the site indicated the victims were Ethiopian men between 25 and 40 years old. The decomposing bodies were exhumed and taken to a morgue for autopsy. They appeared to have been buried “not more than a month” ago, he said. Malawi is a popular route for people from east Africa being smuggled to South Africa – the continent’s most industrialised country and a magnet for poor migrants from elsewhere on the continent. Kalaya said that between January and September this year, authorities intercepted 221 migrants, 186 of whom were Ethiopians.