Zimbabwean crushed to death by falling lift

Zimbabwean crushed to death by falling lift

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By Staff Reporter

HORRIFIED shoppers watched as a Zimbabwean man was crushed to death when a 2 000kg lift fell on him while cleaning it's shaft in South Africa Tuesday, reports said.

Lindane Ndlovu, 22, died instantly when an unidentified person flicked a control switch, prompting the glass lift to move -- and trapping him between it and the shaft wall.

Ndlovu arrived in South Africa in September as an economic refugee and had been working at the site of the new @ Home store at Nicol Grove shopping centre, Fourways, for only five weeks.

About five people in the glass lift screamed as they saw the cleaner being squashed to death, the Star newspaper reported.

"The deceased was wedged about 2m off the ground," ER24 spokesperson Nick Dollman said last night. "He was crushed between 2 000kg counterweights of the lift and a horizontal support beam."

Emergency workers spent more than three hours trying to free Ndlovu's body from the shaft. They broke the lift's glass and used a blowtorch to cut the steel support beam.

Francis, a brother of the dead man, said Lindane was the youngest sibling in a family of seven.

"He was a very quiet boy who would never miss church for anything. He was in love with computer technology. He had lost his job as an assistant in an Internet café in Zimbabwe and decided to come to South Africa," Francis told the Star.

Francis said there had been no warning of possible danger at the lift and, despite asking questions, he could get no answers about who had switched the lift on.

Suran Kashab, the owner of the cleaning company that employed Ndlovu, said the store manager had been asked to switch the lift off so that Ndlovu and another cleaner could go through the lift's trapdoor and into the shaft.

"They were busy cleaning inside the shaft when suddenly the lift moved. I think somebody went in and switched the lift on," he said.

He has no idea who it was.

Howard Godfrey, the @ Home managing director, said: "The regional manager had switched off the lift but it moved. We don't know how that happened."

Joburg Emergency Management Services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said a colleague of Ndlovu had fallen down the lift well while the lift was moving and survived.

"He wasn't seen after the accident. His colleagues said he ran away," he said.

An electrician working in the store at the time of the tragedy said: "We were all focused on our work when we suddenly heard a heavy thud. Then people started screaming.

"The lift stopped and, when we went over and looked, the cleaner was hanging with his chin on a steel bar on the side of the shaft."

The store staged a grand opening on Wednesday.
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