Mystery surrounds which police officers conducted the interrogations of members of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) last week.
Three LPM members claim they were tortured, while the fourth claims that ”plain-clothed policemen” tried to remove her from the police station where they were being held. The Mail & Guardian has copies of two of their statements to the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) that detail their treatment while in custody.
Lungelo Dlamini, the Gauteng police spokesperson, said he could not comment on the allegations of torture, nor on LPM doubts about who conducted the interrogations, because the case is now with the ICD.
Another policeman who wished to remain anonymous said that the Organised Crime Threat Analysis — a police body that monitors potential security threats — does not include the LPM. ”They are harmless,” he said.
The M&G reported two weeks ago that about 60 LPM members were arrested on election day in Thembelihle informal settlement near Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, while they were demonstrating as part of their ”No Land, No Vote” election boycott. They were held in the Protea South prison overnight and released on R300 bail each the following day.
LPM activists Ann Eveleth, Samantha Hargreaves and Moses Mahlangu told the M&G they were removed from their holding cells at midnight on Wednesday. They were then taken in turn to a room where each was confronted with ”at least six plain-clothed security officials”, said Eveleth. They were interrogated separately.
According to Hargreaves’s statement to the ICD, ”[a] large man who was sitting across from me started to get vulgar [when she refused to answer their questions] and proceeded to point his finger at me and continued to shout ‘don’t fuck with me’. Another man then removed my spectacles and threatened to break [them] and remarked that they would blame it on me resisting arrest.”
Then ”the light was switched off and my chair was kicked out from under me. I was pinned on to the ground and had a rubber strip forced over my nose and mouth repeatedly to stop my breathing,” she told the M&G, summarising the details of her written statement. ”I passed out three times.”
Eveleth’s statement records similar experiences. She told the M&G that she and Hargreaves repeatedly asked their interrogators which unit they were from, which angered the men.
Mahlangu said the plain-clothed men asked him ”why we [the LPM] are struggling, why we were campaigning. If I didn’t co-operate they beat me on my neck.”
The LPM’s Gauteng chairperson, Maureen Mnisi, told the M&G she was removed at midnight from her cell by ”plain-clothed men” who attempted to sign her out of prison and force her into a ”white combi”. However, the uniformed policemen at the Protea South station stopped them, she said.
Mnisi and Mahlangu said that they are still waiting for the ICD to visit them for their statements.
Steve Mabona, the spokesperson for the ICD, said that the directorate is investigating the case. ”I can say no more than that.” He refused to put a timeline on the investigation and said that he was unaware that Mnisi’s and Mahlangu’s statements had not yet been taken.