‘Reporter shot while held in police car’

Press, 29 November 1979, Page 2

‘Reporter shot while held in police car’

NZPA-Reuter London A New Zealand cameraman, released on Tuesday from a Lusaka jail, said yesterday that a Zambian official shot the Australian television reporter. Tony Joyce, while he was being held in a police car. Derek McKendry. who works for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, gave his account of the incident, in which Mr Joyce was critically wounded, after arriving in London early yesterday. Mr Joyce, still gravely ill in a London hospital, was shot in the head while the two men were on a reporting trip to a bridge near Lusaka which had earlier been blown up by Zimbabwe Rhodesian troops. Mr McKendry, aged 38, of Hamilton, told reporters that the, unidentified official fired at Mr Joyce from close range with an automatic pistol while the two men sat with their taxi-driver in the back of a stationary police car.

The Zambian Government has said that Mr Joyce was wounded when Zambian soldiers opened fire to stop their taxi.

Mr McKendry said that he and Mr Joyce were driving away from the Chongwe bridge after filming the site unhindered when a bullet struck the back of their taxi. A dozen men, some in uniform, emerged from the bushes and surrounded them, believing they were Zimbabwe Rhodesian commandos, he said. The men, all agitated, were led by a man in black trousers whom he believed to be a local political official.

The police arrived and searched the two newsmen and made them sit on the back of their car, Mr McKendry said.

“It was at that time that the man in the black trousers shot Tony Joyce. He fired from outside the car about 10ft to 15ft away. He just fired a shot into the car. I was sure Tony was dead.” Mr McKendry said the official told him he was going to kill him, too, but was stopped by the police who then drove the pair back to Lusaka. The cameraman said the armed men had apparently [been influenced by what he j said was an officially in-

! spired campaign to incite anti-white feeling in Zambia as a result of rhe latest Zimbabwe Rhodesian attacks. Mr Joyce, aged 33, was taken to a Lusaka hospital immediately after the incident on November 21, and was flown to London last Sunday accompanied by his wife and two British surgeons.

St Bartholomew’s Hospital I said yesterday he was still : unconscious and in a grave condition. | An A.B.C. reporter, Ken Begg, who flew back from Lusaka with Mr McKendry, said troops guarding the hospital there had tried to prevent Mr Joyce from being taken away on Saturday. “It was a very tense situation. The people there felt they were within a bullet of being shot. They haggled over his stretcher for an hour . . . Mrs Joyce witnessed it,” he said. Mr McKendry said he was well treated while in custody. Police and security officials questioned him at length and took him to a reconstruction of the incident. He said they wanted him to endorse the official version of how Mr Joyce was shot. “They were embarrassed by the fact that Tony Joyce was shot in police custody,” he said. Mr McKendry, who like Mr Joyce is based in London, said he owed his release partly to the intervention of the Australian High Commissioner (Mr Edwin Ryde) and the commission’s second secretary, (Mr David Poulter). Mr McKendry also strongly condemned the treatment of Mr Joyce in Lusaka on Saturday evening while he was waiting to be flown to London.

Mr Joyce was kept waiting on a stretcher while Zambian officials haggled about whether they should release him or kill him, Mr McKendry said. Officials taunted Mr Joyce as a “white imperialist” and argued over him while a plane waited to fly him to London, he said. “The only civilised Zambians I met were prisoners in the jail, and all I could do for them was teach them to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ and ‘Now is the Hour’,” he said.

“It' is a terrible thing to realise you are in a country with no law and order.”