JOHANNESBURG:  A South African woman who paramedics had declared dead after a horrific car crash was later found alive in a mortuary fridge, emergency services said on Monday.

Ambulance service Distress Alert confirmed that the unnamed woman had been certified dead by paramedics at the scene of the pile-up outside of Carletonville, southwest of Johannesburg, in the early hours of June 24.

Mortuary technicians then found her alive in a morgue fridge several hours after the crash in which the victims’ car rolled, throwing all three occupants clear of the vehicle, killing two of them.

“We followed our procedures – we’ve got no idea how it happened,” Distress Alert operations manager Gerrit Bradnick told AFP.

“The crew is absolutely devastated – we’re not in the business of declaring living people dead, we’re in the business of keeping people alive.”

“All the right checks were done – breathing, pulse – so the patient was declared deceased,” he said.

The company has now launched an investigation.

“Paramedics are trained to determine death, not us,” a source at the Carletonville mortuary told the Sowetan newspaper.

“You never expect to open a fridge and find someone in there alive. Can you imagine if we had begun the autopsy and killed her.