Wounded miners got no help, Farlam inquiry told

ALL Bongani Mdze needed to survive the massacre at Marikana two years ago was “a piece of cloth or a sock” — any sort of tourniquet to staunch his blood loss.

Instead, Mdze bled to death on August 16 2012, his last breath taken on his way to hospital.

This week, at the Farlam commission of inquiry, Nicole Lewis, acting for the families of the miners killed at Marikana, questioned Captain Paul Loest about why, in the absence of paramedics, he had not ordered medical attention for those miners wounded by a police fusillade that left 17 dead at one of the scenes.

Loest was in charge of the police tactical response team line who fired on the miners. He is also a trained medic.

Loest said he had spent about five minutes removing weapons from the bodies and then tended to his “traumatised members”. He was reluctant to administer first aid, fearing a malpractice lawsuit.

Lewis noted that officers in the special task force and national intervention unit members with medical training were nearby and could have intervened.

Instead, wounded protesters such as Mongezeleli Ntenetya suffered through the last hour of their lives, said Lewis, with no one providing any assistance.

Loest suffered post-traumatic stress after the massacre and has been medically boarded. He wept while giving evidence.

Lawyers at the commission spent this week attempting to demolish the police version of the killings — that officers were acting in self- and private defence.

Loest conceded that the tactical response team’s action at scene one constituted “gratuitous police brutality”. He also said to Anthony Gotz, for the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, that the miners had been “channelled” towards the tactical response team’s line. Access to Nkaneng township was cut off by armoured police vehicles.

The South African Human Rights Commission’s counsel, Michelle le Roux, suggested that, far from attacking the police, the miners were “hunkered down” around a kraal because they were under tear gas, stun grenade and shotgun fire from policemen while being channelled towards the tactical response team’s line.

Le Roux said that several of the miners who had been shot were not near the police line. Four bodies were found behind the kraal, two inside the kraal and one at its entrance. She said a group of bodies was “piled up hard against the kraal wall”.

She asked why police had not stopped firing when, four seconds into their burst, the dust kicked up made visibility impossible.

Forensic expert Katherine Scott, who examined audio and visual evidence, said in an affidavit that police were still firing at the miners “approximately 55 seconds after the first call to cease fire”. Le Roux said every bullet fired at scene one had been “reckless and unlawful”.

Loest said police had “not [received] an adequate [operational] briefing” by overall commander Brigadier Adriaan Calitz and that the plan’s “detail was sketchy”.

Dali Mpofu, counsel for the miners arrested on August 16, said Calitz’s statement at the police briefing — that commanders would not give orders to use live ammunition and that the decision was left to individual members — was a “veiled instruction to shoot without command”.