2024-01-11 04:10:50
At least 15 people have died during the riots in cities of Papua New Guineawhose Government has called in the Army to try to restore order.
Following a peaceful protest summoned the day before by the Police and other security personnel, some criminals They took advantage of the situation to carry out looting in Port Moresby, the capital, and the city of Lae, the second most populated in the country. According to the latest report published by the Lae metropolitan police, eight people died in the capital and seven in Lae, reports the Australian public channel ABC.
“The ambulance service has received a large number of emergency calls in the capital related to shootings and injured people in an explosion,” the Saint John Papua New Guinea emergency service stressed on its Facebook profile.
Videos posted on social networks show warehouses engulfed in flames and large crowds of people engaging in lootingwhich have spread to other regions and lasted late into the night, according to the local Post-Courier newspaper.
Before the riots, around 200 striking police, army and prison services officers entered Parliament peacefully during a demonstration to protest the tax increase on civil servants’ salaries. Looters and opportunists took advantage of the poor security situation to unleash chaos.
The Prime Minister, James Marape, insisted this morning in an event with the media in asking the population not to “go out into the streets and do whatever they want” and stressed that it is imperative that the country restore security by highlighting that they will open an investigation to determine responsibilities for what happened. “Yesterday the police were not working in the city and people resorted to anarchy,” she added.
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Given the tense situation, On Wednesday, Marape authorized Defense personnel to “assist the police in restoring order” in the country. Military personnel today asked a crowd gathered in Lae for calm, after blocking streets and closing several official buildings in the city, according to the video posted by Post-Courier.
Papua New Guinea, a resource-rich nation that has a large part of its twelve million inhabitants in extreme poverty, is isolated by communications problems, especially in remote areas where security as well as basic health services are lacking. and education. Independent from Australia in 1975, this country – whose Government signed a security agreement with Canberra last December that includes financial aid to modernize its police forces – also has a long history of political intrigue, corruption and internal conflicts.
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