Thalente Ngigi following her alleged assault by an EMPD officer. Picture: Twitter/@MyNameIsNanah
An Ekurhuleni family was left horrified by an assault on their 35-year-old aunt, allegedly at the hands of a metro cop who refused to wear his mask during a random traffic stop.
Still recovering in hospital and awaiting surgery, Thalente Ngigi recounted to The Citizen gruesome details of how she ended up with a broken nose and two black eyes.
She says was traveling home with her family when her sister was flagged down by an EMPD officer for failing to observe a stop sign. Upon interacting with the officer, she allegedly asked him to put on his mask, which was around his neck and not covering his mouth or nose.
According to Ngigi, the officer known to her as “Kunene” did not take kindly to her request that he wear his mask properly while he was speaking to them at close range through an open window.
“I said why are you not wearing the mask why is it under your chin and he just refused. I asked him three times and then he came to my side of the car and he dragged me out of the car and slapped me.”
The officer allegedly refused to wear his mask properly, leading to the assault on Ngigi. Picture: Twitter/@MyNameIsNanah
The officer allegedly slapped Ngigi several times before and after attempting to arrest her. When she asked why she was being arrested, she was told she was being insolent (“uyaphapha”).
The subsequent altercation was partially caught on video and photographed, with the sister taking to Twitter to call out the officer who allegedly beat Ngigi so badly that she suffered extensive injuries.
According to Ngigi, whose story was corroborated by her sister, the officer punched and slapped her several times in the face. The officer also allegedly pointed a gun at another family member who had arrived at the scene to intervene.
When she was eventually driven to a police station, the ordeal continued as she was not only verbally discouraged from filing an assault charge, she was told she was facing a criminal record and would be treated as a suspect.
EMPD spokesperson Kobeli Mokheseng said his department was unaware of the full details of the incident and only saw it on social media.
“We saw that only today and we are still waiting for a complainant to come to our offices so that our internal affairs team can come down and take a statement so we can start an investigation, because currently we don’t know what happened during that fateful day,” Mokheseng told the Citizen.
He added he was not aware the woman was subsequently taken to the Dawn Park Police Station, where according to Ngigi, she was told she faced charges including assault and obstruction of justice.
Mokheseng said it was hard to believe the allegation that Ngigi was discouraged from pressing charges against the officer at the police station. Ngigi was under police guard in Bophelong Hospital in Vosloorus and was expected to appear in court on Thursday.
Meanwhile civil rights group AfriForum is giving legal assistance to two victims of suspected unlawful arrests, which the group said took place during the nationwide lockdown. They say these incidents form part of a pattern of abuses by law enforcement.
According to Marnus Kamfer, AfriForum’s Legal and Risk Manager for Community Safety, in the first incident, a man with a valid permit was pulled over by the SAPS and arrested on the basis of ivory-related offences, seeing as he had an old pair of kudu horns in his vehicle’s boot.
During another incident, a man was arrested because he had cigarettes in his possession for which he couldn’t show proof of purchase.
“A large number of law enforcement authority members showcased their lack of knowledge regarding the current regulations on various occasions during the nationwide lockdown. In a lot of cases the police members are merely malicious and spiteful. We have decided to tackle these two cases with the aim to, among others, bring SAPS members and other law enforcement officials to book for the unlawful manner in which they handle citizens,” said Kamfer.
He hoped the cases would create a precedent that would “discourage law enforcement officials from ‘bullying’ citizens and enforcing the abuse of power,” concludes Kamfer.
According to official police statisticss, 11 people had died at the hands of police officers from the onset of the lockdown.
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