Police opened fire on hundreds of students who planned to walk to Parliament to support the Opposition’s planned vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Peter O’Neill.
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“We want the tensions to de-escalate but it is still a volatile situation”, she told reporters in Sydney.
There were reports police fired directly into a crowd and killed four people, the British newspaper The Guardian said, although the government quickly denied it.
From here there are conflicting reports: students say the police fired first, O’Neill has said “agitators” threw rocks.
Amnesty International has a much higher count, and said nearly 40 people were injured and four remain in a critical condition.
“This is all happening because the prime minister refuses to go down to the police station and answer a few questions”, he said.
Political unrest is sweeping PNG as Mr O’Neill faces continual calls for him to resign as prime minister.
Several eye-witnesses have come forward to say they saw students beaten and shot at, including one case where a student was shot in the head.
Port Moresby General Hospital said 10 students had been admitted.
“We have called on the PNG Government for calm, for proportionate responses to any protests and that protests should be peaceful and lawful”.
Student protest leader Noel Anjo told Reuters on Thursday the protesters had no intention of giving up, noting that the injunction barred students from protesting but not other members of civil society. But the police felt also that there was on the part of the students intimidation or some provocation.
“The students are not going to give up until and unless the prime minister resigns or surrenders himself to police and is arrested and charged”, Anjo said by phone from Port Moresby.
Staycey Yalo, a journalism student at the university, said she and the other protesters encountered a line of police officers blocking them when they tried to march to Parliament.
People in Port Moresby reported cops firing on the public and utilizing tear gas to distribute crowds during a protest at the University of PNG’s Waigani school.
In 2014, an anti-corruption watchdog issued an order for his arrest over the incident, which O’Neill denies.
Most of Papua New Guinea’s seven million people live subsistence existences in isolated mountain villages and scattered tropical islands.
Thousands of students across PNG have been protesting and boycotting classes for weeks amid growing political unrest.
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“Had commodity prices remained high allegations of corruption and fiscal management, not to mention the major foreign exchange shortages now facing the country, would have been far more muted as the government continued to ramp up expenditure”, Pryke wrote in the Guardian.
