Lonmin blamed for 'suicide'

A MINER who survived the Marikana massacre is said to have committed suicide while suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Advocate Dali Mpofu revealed this to a stunned public gallery yesterday when the Farlam Commission of Inquiry reconvened in Rustenburg, North West.

Mpofu, who represents about 270 of the miners arrested on August 16, said the aftereffects of the tragic events were too much for Marvellous Mpofana and he had taken his life at the weekend.

Lonmin had failed to offer miners the post-trauma counselling given to top management, Mpofu said.

Had Mpofana received counselling, his death might have been avoided, he said.

"One of the injured people that we represent committed suicide and his relatives have related this to trauma," Mpofu said.

Muzi Msimang, a member of Mpofu's legal team, later said that Mpofana was one of the seven rock drill operators the team had intended to call to give eye-witness accounts of what happened on August 16 at the Marikana mine.

Mpofana, from Port Shepstone, in KwaZulu-Natal, was a member of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.

"At this stage it appears that it is suicide but we do not have more details. On the day [of the massacre] he was shot through the knee and was now walking on crutches. We do have a detailed statement from him," said Msimang.

Mpofana's family was not present at the hearing but two men, who did not want to be named, said they suspected foul play in his death.

"He could not have managed to hang himself without assistance because he was still in great pain because of the surgery that was recently done on his knee," one said.

North West police spokesman Brigadier Thulani Ngubane said the police had found Mpofana's body on Sunday and that though it appeared to be a case of suicide an inquest docket was opened because the possibility of foul play could not be ruled out.

Mpofana was one of the miners arrested after surviving the Marikana massacre, when police shot dead 34 protesting workers.

The Public Order Policing Unit said yesterday that it found it difficult to deal with a situation in which 4000 armed men refused to disperse.

The head of the police's Northern Cape operational response services, Brigadier Ephraim Mkhwanazi, told the commission that it was difficult for the unit to deal with a crowd armed with pangas, assegais and pistols.

"For [public-order policemen] to be able to deal with the situation, they need to change to firearms proportionate with the arms they are facing," Mkhwanazi said.

Training in public-order policing did not prepare officers to deal with the kind of situation they faced at Marikana on August 16.

The commission chairman, retired judge Ian Farlam, expressed concern about the relevance of Mkhwanazi's evidence because Mkhwanazi had not been given the operational plan used by the police to control the crowd that assembled at Marikana after August 11.