PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — Details are emerging of violence that left at least eight people dead in Papua New Guinea’s Porgera Valley last month, with local officials blaming the country’s elite Kumul 23 tactical police unit — a claim police deny, RNZ Pacific and the Post-Courier reported Tuesday.
Porgera District Administrator Jerry Maku said eight people are known to have been killed and one critically injured in the Sept. 23 incident in Enga Province: six people suspected of being illegal miners shot near the Porgera gold mine, and two landowners killed in their homes. Among the dead was Richard Yope, a 16-year-old student who his family says was passing by. “Frightening things are happening, and we are failing, the government is failing its own people,” Maku told RNZ Pacific.
A letter from Pulumani tribe spokesperson Andreas Wabiria said officers in military fatigues and black masks ordered villagers to assemble, razed Kulapi villages 1 through 4, burned houses and “discharged firearms indiscriminately into the crowd.” “Many other persons remain missing and are presumed dead,” he wrote. RNZ said it had seen footage of bodies covered in blankets and flowers surrounded by mourners.
Police Commissioner David Manning denied that Kumul 23 was behind the killings, saying the unit was in the area to respond to tribal fighting after nine people were murdered by opposing clansmen. In a statement Tuesday he announced that “24 male criminals have been arrested and two armed men killed during a police operation targeting a violent criminal group in Porgera.” The Post-Courier reported that those arrested face charges carrying a minimum sentence of 50 years in prison.
Kumul 23 was created last year under new anti-terrorism laws that gave it “shoot to kill” powers. The mine’s owners, Barrick Niugini and the PNG state, have been trying to curb illegal mining at the site, while a long-promised relocation of landowners living on the Special Mining Lease remains unsettled. Former Deputy Prime Minister Don Polye, an Engan leader, said a teenager’s grieving father came to him in tears, saying “it was the police that shot my son.”
Sources: RNZ Pacific, Post-Courier
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