Malawi has discovered a mass grave in the north of the country containing the remains of 25 people suspected to be migrants from Ethiopia, police said on Wednesday. "The grave was discovered late on Tuesday but we cordoned it off and started exhuming today. So far, we have discovered 25 bodies," police spokesman said. Police were alerted by villagers in the Mzimba area, about 250 kilometres (155 miles) north of the capital Lilongwe, who stumbled on the grave while collecting wild honey in a forest. Malawi is a popular route for illegal immigrants 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. Police often catch trucks transporting migrants passing through the country en route to South Africa, via Mozambique. Kalaya said that between January and September this year, authorities had intercepted 221 illegal immigrants, 186 of whom were Ethiopians. Two years ago immigration authorities in neighbouring Mozambique made a grim discovery, finding 64 migrants from Ethiopia dead inside a freight container loaded on a truck. They were presumed to have died from suffocation. A few survivors were among the group. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) chief in Malawi Nomagugu Ncube said they were still gathering information about the latest incident. The IOM report found that close to 51,000 Ethiopian migrants had gone missing since 2016. According to official statistics, 4,265 deaths and 1,707 disappearances from the districts of Hadiya and Kembata Tembaro were recorded along the southern route to South Africa between 2012 and 2019. An overwhelming number of migrants said they had experienced a severe lack of food, water or shelter on their journey, the IOM researchers found. Most had suffered abuse, violence, assault or torture, while one in four had been asked to find additional money for bribes, despite already paying an average of US$5,000 for the journey. So this kind of criminal activity in Africa is unacceptable. Hence African law enforcement agencies - together with the assistance of the International Intelligence Community - must bring the perpetrators of these severe crimes to justice. Furthermore, the International Community must provide greater assistance to disadvantaged communities who are challenged with socioeconomic deprivation - so that abductions, kidnapping and murder through forced migration can be stopped.