Pike footage promise not honoured – Pike River families

Pike River families are disappointed the Prime Minister’s claim that all footage taken inside the mine would be released has not been honoured, as the New Zealand Police have only released material already leaked to the media.

Sonya Rockhouse, whose son Ben died in the mine, says her request for the 265GB of footage and documents held by police is not too much to ask after six and a half years of waiting for answers. “We need to know what the government knows. We’ve been told we cannot get our boys out but we have never been given the evidence of why.”

Anna Osborne, whose husband Milton died at Pike River, says the Government’s repeated refusals are wearing thin. “We’ve asked for the footage, we’ve asked for the open boreholes to be re-examined with modern cameras, we’ve asked for the government to sit down with our experts and make their case for re-entering the drift tunnel to recover bodies and evidence and each time we’ve been fobbed off.”

“The suggestion that all of the families and their QCs would have forgotten images of a robot smoking in the drift is incredibly insulting. We have never seen this footage before it was leaked to us and we have been asking for it and other footage for a long time.”

Carol Rose, whose son Stuart Mudge died in the mine, says the families want answers. “It doesn’t feel like the government wants us to get justice, they want to manage us like we’re some kind of political problem. We want all the footage that the government has got. Our men are in there, and it’s our right as families to see what the government has seen.”

Police have advised the families that they will be making the footage public at 10am today.