Media Release: Police Commissioner bungles Urewera case again
From: October 15th Solidarity
Date: 23 April 2012

“Police Commissioner Peter Marshall has waded into the Urewera raids case and bungled it up again. He issued a statement saying that only three of the original defendants were Tuhoe and all the rest were pakeha.* Seven were Tuhoe, and five more were Maori from Taranaki, Maniapoto and Nga Puhi. Only five of the original 17 defendants were pakeha. Either the police can’t these basic facts right or they want to willfully mislead the public in order to minimise their acts of brutality on Tuhoe. I am not sure which is worse: more faulty police ‘intelligence’ or more police propaganda,” said Valerie Morse of the October 15th Solidarity Group.

“Marshall then claims that the people arrested were ‘fringe’ to Tuhoe Yet at the recent trial in Auckland, the spokesperson for the tribe, Tamati Kruger appeared as an expert witness and said that he himself had attended one of these wananga. Mr. Kruger is mandated by 97% of Tuhoe.”

“Peter Marshall seems bewildered by the fact that many Tuhoe are still angry and aggrieved over the 2007 raids. He maintains that police were simply looking for criminals, not targeting Tuhoe. So how does he explain the paramilitary invasion and lock-down of the community of Ruatoki? How does he explain an armed police roadblock of the only way in and out of the village where every person’s rights were violated?”

“After five years, it is astonishing that the police don’t have the guts to admit that they were wrong. Not only were they wrong about the terrorism and the ‘gang’, they were wrong to undertake this investigation in the first place; it was a racist police operation from start to finish. This case cost the life of Tuhoe Lambert who died while awaiting trial.“

“From the beginning we have demanded that all of these charges be dropped. We maintain this demand: the arms act convictions must be quashed, and police and politicians held responsible for the damage Operation 8 has caused.’

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*Peter Marshall’s Statement, issued to Radio New Zealand for their Insight programme which aired on Sunday morning 22 April at 8:12am and re-airs Monday evening at 7:30pm April, is below:

“Of the 17 originally arrested as a result of Operation 8 only three had tribal affiliations to Tuhoe, and the others were pakeha.”

The programme is available at http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight and the Police Commissioners comments can be heard at 22:50

ENDS

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