Summary Eight police officers accused of killing an immigrant taxi driver were suspended on Friday.
PRETORIA (AFP) - South Africa s police commissioner on Friday suspended eight police officers accused of dragging an immigrant taxi driver behind their patrol car and killing him, prompting international outcry.
Commissioner Riah Phiyega said that the eight officers had been disarmed and suspended for "callous and unacceptable behaviour" and the station commander had been removed from his post pending investigation.
Twenty-seven-year-old Mozambican taxi driver Mido Macia was filmed being manhandled, handcuffed and dragged by a police van through the streets to a police station east of Johannesburg.
Just over two hours later he was found dead in custody.
A post mortem found the cause of death was head injuries with internal bleeding.
The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) has opened a murder investigation.
South African President Jacob Zuma earlier condemned the killing as "horrific, disturbing and unacceptable".
Footage of the incident spread quickly online and sent shockwaves through the country, shining a spotlight yet again on the conduct of South Africa s much maligned police force.
Phiyega insisted the episode was being thoroughly investigated.
"Any one death is one too many," she said, adding that "what is in the video is not how the SAPS (South African Police Service) in a democratic South Africa goes about its work."
In an interview with AFP, Phiyega, who has been in the job for less than a year, rejected suggestions that the police force under her watch was lurching from crisis to crisis.
She insisted the force was regionally respected, but that abuses were bound to happen with over 200,000 officers in its ranks.
"It s a monstrous organisation, so to have these types of incidents, it s not untoward, you will always have them," she said.
"As and when they happen, we shall decisively and unequivocally, without doubt, deal with those."
The country s beleaguered police service has been pilloried for shooting dead 34 striking miners last August.
It was also humiliated when it emerged that the officer investigating the murder case against star sprinter Oscar Pistorius himself faced charges of attempted murder for shooting at a taxi.
"They are criminals in uniform," said earlier Bongani Hlela, a street trader based at the taxi stand where the Macia incident occurred.
The fact that the abuse occurred in public "is an example of the culture of impunity which has taken root in our public service," said opposition politician Mamphela Ramphele.
"Some members of the police -- who are no longer a service but a force, as they were under apartheid -- are behaving with unbelievable callousness," Mamphela said, drawing a scathing comparison with violent police acts under white minority rule, which ended 19 years ago.
The IPID received 720 new cases for investigation of suspicious deaths in custody or in other policing contexts from April 2011 to March 2012, according to rights organisation Amnesty International.
Macia s death has also prompted a diplomatic incident with neighbouring Mozambique, whose government was "outraged by what happened".
"It is very sad that a life was lost so stupidly," Foreign Affairs Minister Oldemiro Baloi told reporters in the capital Maputo.
"I think that whatever perspective you want to attach to it -- either human or the relations between the two countries -- it is absolutely unacceptable.
The Mozambican "was killed by police in the most brutal way," said country s ambassador Fernando Fazenda, who has appointed an advocate to represent the family.
Macia had moved to South Africa as 10-year-old boy when his parents travelled to work on the mines, according to Mozambican high commissioner Fernando Fazenda, who has appointed an advocate to represent the family.
He came from the town Macia 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Maputo. His wife and son had been on holiday in Mozambique and are returning to South Africa.
