A five-year-old boy was trapped inside a shack and two people were injured during police evictions.
|||A five-year-old boy was trapped inside a shack and two people were injured during police evictions in northern Joburg on Wednesday morning.
The Joburg metro police department (JMPD) began evicting residents of an informal settlement in Marlboro Gardens, next to Alexandra, at 4am.
“We just heard the bangs (of the hammers). We were sleeping and this woke us up,” said Raymond Mudau, one of the residents.
Mudau said the JMPD had not told anyone before they began evictions and started knocking down the shacks with hammers. He said the JMPD had then moved the residents to the street outside.
The five-year-old boy was trapped when the corrugated iron walls of his family’s shack collapsed.
His mother, Save Msimango, had gone to the nearby shop to buy airtime to call the child’s father when the evictions began. When she returned, several shacks had been knocked down and she couldn’t find her son.
His father, Patrick Ndlovu, said a resident had heard the child crying and pulled him out of the debris.
Police spokeswoman Captain Pinky Tsinyane said there had been a shoot-out between the JMPD and residents in the morning and police had then been called out.
Police said they were investigating charges of public violence, attempted murder and arson against the residents, but no arrests had been made.
JMPD spokesman Wayne Minnaar said officers had informed the residents on Saturday that they had erected shacks on municipal land.
He said that because they were on municipal land, the JMPD did not need a court order to evict them.
He also said the crowd had fired shots at his officers first, but some residents, including Mudau, disagreed and said the police fired first.
Minnaar estimated the number of shacks on the property at 100, while the residents said there were about 50.
Two residents had been injured, but police could not confirm the cause or nature of their injuries, said Tsinyane.
brendan.roane@inl.co.za
The Star
