Media reports that Pretoria police had beaten a Sunnyside prostitute into a coma were an ”absolute thumb-suck”, national Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi said on Friday.
Talking to a South African National Editors’ Forum delegation about media communications, Mbeki said these reports show how difficult police work can be at times.
”Take this report that our police beat up this prostitute, for example,” he said. ”There was never a coma. It is a thumb-suck.”
Selebi recounted in detail how he had, in response to the initial reports on Wednesday, dispatched a deputy police commissioner to investigate the matter immediately.
The senior police officer had gone to the hospital where the prostitute had been taken to find that she had already been released.
”The doctor showed him the medical report. There was no coma. The patient had some irritation of the eyes, which came from pepper spray. The wounds around her neck, which was shown prominently in photographs, were old burn marks from something else.
”The policeman then followed up the supposed address given by the prostitute in Hammanskraal. The people there said they had never seen or heard of such a person.
”She has disappeared. How can a person in a coma give a false address?” Selebi asked.
The commissioner added that these details had been given at length already to the newspaper that originally published the report. ”I don’t know what they will be doing with it.”
Editors responded to the commissioner on this example by pointing out that the story had been in the public domain for a number of days already, with the only official comment from police media liaison being that the allegations of police brutality were ”under investigation”.
They suggested that the police should have reacted far more swiftly to correct the facts. Selebi said he noted the point being made. — Sapa