Long wait after 10111 call questioned
November 18 2013 at 03:31pm
By LIAM JOYCE
By LIAM JOYCE
Durban - The Amanzimtoti Community
Crime Prevention Organisation (CCPO) will be demanding answers from the SAPS
after it took police more than 40 minutes to respond to an emergency call,
reporting the brutal assault and murder of an elderly woman.
It also said if police had responded
faster, the suspects could have been caught.
Eddna Jumaima Botha, 75, was murdered
in her Athlone home early on Saturday after four men broke in. The grandmother
of five was hacked to death. Her husband, Braam Botha, a former Daily News
printing technician, is partly blind and disabled.
Police spokesman Colonel Jay Naicker
said on Sunday that no arrests had been made, but detectives were looking for
four suspects.
According to CCPO members who were
called to the scene by a neighbour, when they dialled 10111 the emergency
operator requested specific information about the victim, which they did not
have.
“More than one call was made by our
members who were quick to attend the scene. Our control room is operated
through Blue Security, so the operator should have known that it was a serious
call and not a prank,” said the chairman, Robert Allkins.
It took police 40 minutes to respond
and Allkins said the suspects could have been caught in that time. “A member of
the CCPO who arrived at the scene pursued two suspects who ran into the nearby
bush, and managed to get away with the other two suspects.
We will be taking this issue up with
SAPS. We do work very closely with them, so I am sure we will be able to get
answers.”
Naicker said police had been dispatched
to the scene. “We are unaware of the allegations that the 10111 call centre did
not dispatch anyone and we request those that made the allegations to come
forward so that we can investigate them.”
He said the police advised people to
keep all emergency numbers at hand, including police and ambulance numbers.
“Test these numbers regularly,
especially if you are using cellphone technology, as we have found in many
instances that these numbers are not programmed by the telephone service
provider and those calls could be directed to other police stations in the
province, or even out of the province,” Naicker said.
In May, the 10111 emergency call centre
came under fire after it was revealed that no calls had been recorded for the
past six months, because the centre’s equipment was out of order.
At the time the SAPS blamed the failure
to record calls on construction at the centre.
And in March, a South Coast woman’s cry
for help while she and her family were being held by robbers was logged as a
hoax by the 10111 emergency line operator.
Daily News
