• Police tie and beat man suspected of drug possession to death
• “I will demand my son from them,” grieving father
The grieving father of a man who was brutally killed by cops in Maun in full glare of the public has rubbished claims that his son died from swallowing a sachet of drugs.
Expressing his anger and intention to sue, Morolong Mosimanegape said, “There were eyewitness who saw police beating my son up, kicking him and poking him with nozzles of their guns. They broke his lips and he was bleeding from the mouth by the time he lost consciousness.”
Mosimanegape further added that people told him that despite screaming onlookers who pleaded with the enraged cops to stop killing a human being, the cops simply carried on until his son was unconscious.
“That is when they rushed in panic to get water to pour on him, hoping to revive him, but then it appears it was already late, very late,” said Mosimanegape.
The police are said to have then rushed the dead man, Koolopile Koolopile, to Sehithwa clinic where he was immediately transferred to Letsholathebe memorial hospital where he was certified dead on arrival.
30-year-old Koolopile of Botshabelo ward met his demise at the hands of the police on Saturday in a scuffle that ensued because he did not want to be searched.
According to Mosimanegape, his son, together with two other men, had embarked on a journey to Tsau to fix Mosimanegape’s Hilux which had broken down in that village.
‘They took the gearbox to fix the car,” he explained.
However, at Setata veterinary gate, the three buddies were stopped by the police for a search.
When they were finished with the car, police started searching the men but, when they came closer to Koolopile, he would move away, seemingly to avoid being searched.
“The police, I am told, asked him why he was avoiding the search and he asked them why they wanted to search him when they did not find anything in the car,” narrated Mosimanegape.
Allegedly, the police then took a rope and lassoed him with it, causing him to fall over before they descended on with him with guns and boots.
Dismissing the police’s side of the story as a cover up for police brutality, Mosimanegape maintained that if his son was indeed found with drugs, the police should have taken him to the police station after binding him with a rope instead of assaulting and subjecting him to inhumane brutality, which was even caught on camera by a bystander who then posted it on social media where it has since gone viral.
Even though the police have maintained, through their public relations office in Gaborone, that Koolopile passed out after swallowing a sachet of drugs which was in his possession during the scuffle, Mosimanegape said, “The police killed my child and I will demand him from them. What they said was just PR stories and I don’t believe them.”
According to Mosimanegape, Koolopile’s colleagues have told him that they were only shown the sachet, which the police claimed to have removed from him at the police station.
“They do not know where the sachet came from,” he said.
Koolopile’s body was expected to go for postmortem on Thursday.