ICD head Francois Beukman said their investigation has found that police bullets did not kill the fugitive French couple. Picture: Michael Walker ICD head Francois Beukman said their investigation has found that police bullets did not kill the fugitive French couple. Picture: Michael Walker
Although the bodies of the fugitive French couple Philippe Ménière and Agnès Jardel were riddled with police bullets, these shots did not kill them, an Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) investigation has found.
The couple killed themselves. Ménière, 60, first shot his wife, 55, and then turned the gun on himself, the ICD said at a briefing yesterday.
ICD executive director Francois Beukman said their investigation had established that the cause of death was “self-inflicted contact gunshots to the heads with a high velocity firearm”.
They died in their hideout on the Hardie farm about 20km outside Sutherland on January 20 after being on the run in the surrounding Karoo for almost a week.
Beukman said an ICD team had been sent to Sutherland on the day of the shooting, where they had interviewed police officers and assessed the scene.
“Considering the contents of the SAPS officers’ statements, the post-mortem reports, the ballistics report and from observations made, it can be concluded that the deaths of the deceased persons cannot be attributed to the actions of the SAPS members and that the cause of death was self-inflicted contact gunshots to the heads.
“It is evident from the post- mortem examination that the wounds inflicted from the SAPS’ fired shots were not the cause of death, but were shot at persons that were already clinically dead,” Beukman said.
Asked why the police had shot at corpses, Dan Morema, provincial head of the ICD, replied: “They heard two gunshots so maybe they were under the impression they were being fired at. They must have thought so… They had multiple gunshots on their bodies but these were not the cause of death. At the time they were shot at, they were dead.”
These findings of the ICD contradict what Hawks spokesman McIntosh Polela said on February 8, about two weeks after the incident. Polela said at the time that when the police had stormed the couple’s farmhouse hideout, Ménière had shot and killed his wife “and then shot and wounded himself in an attempted suicide. He then turned the gun on police, who were already inside the house.” Polela said Ménière had died as a result of the “combined wounds” from his own shots and police bullets.
When the Cape Times asked the ICD about the discrepancy between the Hawks statement and that of the ICD, Morema replied that their investigations had found no evidence of a shootout.
“The man shot his wife and then shot himself with a .357 Magnum pistol... We agree they were shot at, but by the time they were shot at they were already dead.”
The couple were on the run for six days after Ménière had shot dead student police officer Jacob Bolema, 27, on the farm of Gerhardus du Plessis, where they had lived a reclusive life for 12 years.
Ménière wounded a second police officer, Glenwall du Toit, who was shot in the back as he fled. The incident occurred when the police and Du Plessis’s two sons, Cobus and Jaen, went to seize firearms from the French couple, as the licences had expired. As the guns were loaded into the police van, Ménière shot Bolema.
Asked whether the correct police procedure had been followed when the weapons had been confiscated, Beukman said the ICD had not investigated the incident.
Under their current mandate, the ICD investigated only incidents where civilians had been shot by police. - Cape Times
melanie.gosling@inl.co.za