Pretoria - A man who was held in the Brooklyn police cells for 114 days on allegations of copper theft and was released only on his acquittal is claiming more than R3 million in damages from the minister of police.
The Pretoria High Court last week found the police were liable for any damages which Tebogo George Mponya can prove he had suffered while being locked up.
Acting Judge H Kooverjie found that Mponya, a contract worker, should not have been arrested in the first place, as the police had acted on flimsy evidence.
The police based their case against him on the allegations of only one person, who said he saw Mponya in the vicinity of the copper theft site.
Two policemen testified that in December 2009 they received a complaint about copper theft at a sub-station in Pretoria. A worker claimed he saw two men stealing the copper wire and pointed Mponya out as one of the culprits.
The police took a statement from him and, without investigating any further, arrested and detained Mponya.
They said they checked two holes on the site and saw copper was missing. Armed with this information and an “eyewitness”, they felt they had enough evidence against Mponya.
Mponya testified that on December 1, 2009, he was fetched at Marabastad by his employer and taken to a site where he had to build wooden caskets for casting concrete blocks.
There were 10 people on site. Four were digging the foundation trenches and the alleged witness to the copper theft worked about 16 metres away from where he was.
According to Mponya, there were no copper wires where he was working. The holes were not fenced off and people could move freely around the area.
Mponya said only much later that afternoon was he accused of stealing the copper, although it later appeared the copper had disappeared during the morning.
Although he denied any knowledge of this, he was arrested.
Counsel for the police told the court that one did not need concrete evidence to establish that an offence had been committed, but only a suspicion.
Judge Kooverjie, however, said that when the police have an initial suspicion that a crime was committed, this must be confirmed before it became a “reasonable suspicion”.
He said the police should have questioned the other workers, and taken pictures of the crime scene and measurements of the holes.
“A little more was required from them,” the judge said, other than relying on the evidence of one witness and looking at the empty holes.
The amount of damages owed to Mponya will be determined at a later stage.
Pretoria News