Post Courier on murdered student

UNIVERSITY of Technology students are boycotting classes, starting today. They are protesting over the shooting dead of a fellow student during the early hours of Saturday near a bottle shop at Tent Siti. Student leaders said the boycott of classes would be indefinite. The students are demanding that the University allow the sale and consumption of liquor from the Unitech club. At a forum yesterday, the students said this was the second time that a student had suffered at the hands of criminals while looking for alcohol outside of the campus. In 2003 a student from Enga province was shot dead at the University bus-stop while on his way back to the campus after a night out. The student killed at the weekend was doing his third year in Computer Science and was from Baiyer in Western Highlands province. He had gone with two other colleagues to a beer outlet at Tent Siti and were walking back towards the campus when a group of men stopped them and asked for their beer. When the students refused a gang member shot the student at close range. He died instantly. His colleagues went back to the campus after taking his body to the Angau Hospital and recruited more boys and returned to the site of the shooting to hunt for the attackers. The students burnt down a house at the back of the beer outlet which they suspected was the hiding place of the attackers. On Saturday morning large groups of students marched to the Taraka Police station, where they presented a petition to police demanding for police and the community to ‘care and respect students’. They also petitioned the police to act quickly on finding the killers. The students also placed road-blocks outside the university gate and searched some vehicles going to and coming from Tent Siti and Bumayong. Police later ordered the students to remove the road-blocks. Police sources said yesterday a man, believed to be the one who shot dead the student, surrendered and is in police custody. Four other suspects were also rounded up, while two others are at large.