Blantyre City Council (BCC) rangers, who were in the company of police officers on Tuesday, beat up a man, identified as Robert Moyo, on suspicion that he wanted to wash cars.<\/p>\n
The 31 years-old Moyo, who sells newspapers in the city, said he was arrested at around 4 o\u2019clock in the afternoon as he helped a woman to load goods in her car.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe city rangers beat me hard. I lost three teeth and a lot of blood before the police threw me in a cell at Blantyre Police.\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Moyo said he was not allowed to go to the hospital let alone be released until Centre for Human Rights Education, Advice and Assistance (Chreaa) intervened.<\/p>\n
BCC\u2019s Public Relations Manager, Anthony Kasunda, while acknowledging the case, said Moyo attacked the city rangers first and that the rangers beat him in self defence.<\/p>\n
He said Moyo was confronted by the city rangers for washing a car in the city and not illegal vending.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is illegal to wash cars in the city. He attacked the city rangers who wanted to confiscate his car-washing equipment and they beat him up in self defence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Blantyre Police spokesperson, Elizabeth Divala, distanced the police from the act arguing that they only intervened after they were told by the rangers that Moyo had attacked them.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we later established that the city rangers used force and Moyo is a victim. We have recorded a statement from him as a complainant,\u201d Divala said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blantyre City Council (BCC) rangers, who were in the company of police officers on Tuesday, beat up a man, identified as Robert Moyo, on suspicion that he wanted to wash cars. The 31 years-old Moyo, who sells newspapers in the city, said he was arrested at around 4 o\u2019clock in the afternoon as he helped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28577,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28565\/revisions\/28577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}