Johannesburg -
Legal teams at the Claassen Board of Inquiry say they will not call any more witnesses to testify at the hearing into suspended national police Commissioner General Riah Phiyega’s fitness to hold office.
They said this after Phiyega’s defence team concluded their cross-examination of former brigadier and SAPS media relations officer Lindela Mashigo.
Evidence leader Ismail Jamie, SC, closed his case after advocate William Mokhari, for Phiyega, concluded his questioning of Mashigo.
Mokhari focused his questions on Mashigo's evidence pertaining to Phiyega's allegedly having dictated changes to a media statement about events that transpired during the Marikana massacre.
Mashigo failed, when the Farlam Commission of Inquiry was under way, to raise the issue of being manipulated by Phiyega.
Mashigo told the Claassen inquiry he had made his statement after Phiyega implicated him at the Farlam commission's hearings.
Mashigo, now media relations director for the City of Tshwane, has said one of the changes he made was not differentiating between scenes 1 and 2 where 34 miners were shot dead by police.
The changes were to keep the media in the dark, presenting the events as a single incident in which the miners were killed.
Mashigo conceded he had altered aspects of the document before Phiyega dictated changes of her own.
In his affidavit, Mashigo said he and Captain Dennis Adrian had made changes to the document in the presence of the suspended national commissioner and other senior SAPS officers.
Mokhari told Mashigo: “You did not say that you made the changes together with Adrian and that the national commissioner made further changes.
“That is what you don't say in this document.”
The former brigadier acknowledged he had distributed a media statement that had been written by Adrian and which said a “heavily armed group of illegal gatherers at a hilltop close to Lonmin mine - the SAPS was viciously attacked by the group, using a variety of weapons, including firearms”.
He acknowledged he had done this before Phiyega could address the media about the police's conduct.
Mokhari said the extract referred to only one scene and asked Mashigo if he had been to Marikana before the day of the massacre.
Mashigo said he had been in Pretoria and was receiving information from officers deployed in Marikana.
The inquiry continues on June 1-3.
Legal teams are to present their closing arguments.
Among other things, the inquiry is trying to establish whether Phiyega could have foreseen the “tragic and catastrophic consequences” of deciding to follow a tactical route; and whether she and other officers misled the Farlam commission about when this decision was taken.
Saturday Star