South African Police officers guard the house of a union leader who was gunned down at Lonmin’s Marikana mine, yesterday.
MARIKANA, South Africa: A female union leader was gunned down at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in South Africa yesterday, police said, almost a year after officers shot dead 34 strikers at the mine.
Amid a deadly inter-union battle for supremacy, police spokesman Thulani Ngubane said a person was shot dead at the mine’s Rowland shaft northwest of Johannesburg.
“Officers are still on the scene,” he said.
The powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) confirmed the woman had been one of its leaders at the troubled mine.
“This morning she was fatally shot next to our offices,” said National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) spokesman Lesiba Seshoka.
“This shop steward woman was an important worker in the union,” he added.
A blanket covered the woman’s body where she was killed outside her house in the mine’s Western Platinum division at 10am (0800 GMT).
Police kept a car with weeping mourners from approaching the cordoned-off scene close to where strikers clashed with authorities a year ago.
The victim was a mother of three and also fostered three more children, according to her niece Nbongile Madolo.
“Everybody’s scared of what has happened now. If you start talking, start doing anything, you don’t know what might happen to you,” Madolo said.
A neighbour said she was “shocked” over the targeting of a woman leader at the mine. “It’s the first time they’ve shot dead a lady, all the time it’s the men,” she said.
“We don’t have any reaction from the police. Even now it’s not safe ... There is no security, we are not secure,” she added.
The latest murder precedes by just a few days the one-year commemoration of the Marikana bloodbath. AFP
