Tue, 18 Apr 2017 09:57:20 +0000
BY NATION REPORTER
Mutinta Hichilema has confessed that the family hid in a secret bunker at their house to evade the police. They went into the bunker at 22.00 hours as soon as the police arrived at the house.
The police went to the house and searched the house and the premises and could not find them. Eventually, hours later, frustrated and annoyed, the police rounded up the workers to demand the whereabouts of the Hichilema’s who they knew for certain, apparently from their surveillance, were within the building.
Speaking in an interview in which she called for a national uprising against the Zambian government she explained that when the police arrived, HH, herself and their youngest son hid in the room from 22.00 hours.
During that time police tried to locate them and they could hear them asking workers to identify where they were hiding. The workers, she said, initially refused to
disclose their location, but as time dragged on, one of them whom she says was badly tortured and may have had his private parts touched, pointed out where they were hiding.
At that point she said police threw tear gas into the bunker to try and smoke them out, “We were in that room from 22.00 hours, … the police were beating all our workers. All of them now are in the cells, they tortured them, they beat them, they brutalized them and then they were asking where’s your boss? At first they didn’t want to say, but then one of them, he took them to our room there.Where is your boss, where is your boss, beating him and I could hear him crying.
“Then HH said my friend let me go, I said no, you are not coming out, it is you they want, It was 220.00 hours. He said can I come out because they are going to kill my workers, I said no because if you come out they will take you and I don’t know where they will take you because there is no one here it is just the police, and they are going to kill you where they will take you.
You wait until it is day break and then at least there will be people around, your lawyers will be here and then you can come out and then they will take you.
We were in that room and so when they brought that boy, he was crying uncontrollably, I don’t know where they were touching him somewhere, on his private parts, he took them to our room there.
I think then he said ya I think the boss is there. And then they brought their teargas, started smoking us out, smoking teargas, smoking tear gas in the bunker where we were …. and as an asthmatic I fainted twice, and our little boy, our last born was also there.”
In the meanwhile HH was on phone with international and local contacts, appealing for rescue effort especially from the Brenhurst Trust, apparently controlled by the Oppenheimer family, apparently seeking for a rescue attempt.
