An attempt by the police on Thursday to disperse striking workers at Marikana’s troubled Lonmin mine ended in a shootout between the two groups.<\/p>\n
A Sapa reporter at the scene said he counted 18 bodies lying next to the nearby Wonderkop squatter camp. The shooting lasted about three minutes.<\/p>\n
Police had tried to intercept a section of the strikers gathered on top of a hill.<\/p>\n
The strikers were wielding pangas and chanting war songs. Police fired teargas and then used a water cannon to disperse the strikers, who retaliated by firing live ammunition at the police.<\/p>\n
The area around the hill, which the strikers had turned into their base for the past few days, was cordoned off with barbed wire.<\/p>\n
The strikers scattered towards the squatter camp and the nearby veld.<\/p>\n
Police spokesman Captain Dennis Adriao told journalists at the scene police had been “tactical” in their approach and that the situation was tense. – Sapa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An attempt by the police on Thursday to disperse striking workers at Marikana’s troubled Lonmin mine ended in a shootout between the two groups. A Sapa reporter at the scene said he counted 18 bodies lying next to the nearby Wonderkop squatter camp. The shooting lasted about three minutes. Police had tried to intercept a … Continue reading “18 dead in Lonmin shootout”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[793,768,794,205,490,795,243],"class_list":["post-1092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-dennis-adriao","tag-lonmin","tag-marikana","tag-police","tag-rustenburg","tag-shootout","tag-strike"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1094,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions\/1094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}