Five months after the Marikana Massacre in South Africa, footage of police action at the ‘killing koppie‘ [“hill”] has finally reached the public. This footage somewhat predictably wasn’t brought to our attention by the local media, who have long since moved on to other things since the Marikana story stopped selling. Rather, it was Channel 4 in the United Kingdom who brought this footage to light. Why then did it take so long for the footage to reach us and why did it reach us in such a manner? Was it deliberately suppressed or is there a police whistleblower? One can reasonably speculate that the police were ordered to delete the evidence collected on their mobile phones in the aftermath of the massacre, but surely more footage has survived the culling of a cover-up.
Four months after the story of the killing koppie was brought into the mainstream media (working off the research of a group of University of Johannesburg sociologists) by Greg Marinovich and South African web-based publication Daily Maverick, cellphone footage taken by police at the scene of the massacre appears to provide further evidence to support Marinovitch’s claims of ‘execution style killings’.
The highly disturbing footage shows police moving around, taking potshots, joking about killings and even boasting about shooting one “motherfucker” ten times, despite the easily ignored plea of one officer to not shoot the “bastard”. It shows numerous corpses around the area with police idly watching over, while the wounded writhe in agony.
It gives us a first person perspective of the shooter with the cellphone showing us the gun of the person filming it, as if it was a video game or a action movie. It blurs the line between the hyper-reality of a video game and the grotesque of a snuff film…..
South Africa Today – South Africa News
