S. Africa Police Blamed in Fatal Shootings of Black Protesters Last March : Inquiry: A scathing report says officers opened fire on a crowd without legal justification. It urges that criminal charges be placed against them.

In a scathing report released Saturday, an independent judicial inquiry into the police slayings of five black protesters in Sebokeng last March concludes that at least 30 officers opened fire on a crowd without legal justification.

The investigation, chaired by Justice Richard J. Goldstone, recommended that the attorney general consider filing criminal charges against the police officers “who shot live ammunition into the crowd . . . without an order to do so.” It concluded that, in any event, no such order had been warranted by the crowd’s behavior.

Goldstone’s inquiry, one of the strongest indictments of South Africa’s police ever made by a government-appointed investigator, was released Saturday by Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok. Vlok said he would follow the recommendations and present cases against some of his officers to the attorney general.

The South African police force has come under heavy criticism in recent months from anti-apartheid leaders who charge that its officers have used excessive force against peaceful protests and taken sides in recent black factional fighting around Johannesburg. Vlok has denied those allegations.

The March 26 killings in Sebokeng, about 30 miles south of Johannesburg, almost derailed the first round of talks between the government and the African National Congress. Citing the “massacre of innocent and defenseless people,” the ANC pulled out of a planned meeting with the government and agreed to reschedule the talks only when President Frederik W. de Klerk promised that he would investigate the Sebokeng incident.

In Sebokeng that day, police confronted 30,000 blacks protesting poor living conditions. The officers opened fire without warning, killing five and injuring more than 200. As many as 10 other people died in rioting and additional clashes with police later that day in Sebokeng and nearby townships.

In a statement, the ANC said the commission’s findings reinforce “the perceptions widely held by our people that the police are not a body for the maintenance of order, but a force of oppression.”

The ANC said it “fully expects that all police personnel involved in this incident will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

After a series of public hearings, Goldstone found that Capt. W. J. du Plooy, who was in charge of the “police line” that day, had “erred in a number of important respects,” including failing to call for reinforcements and not knowing where his men were positioned, what arms they were carrying or the type of ammunition that had been loaded.

“There was a complete lack of discipline in the police line, which was the direct cause of the shooting,” Goldstone said in his report.

The line included black and white riot officers, municipal policemen and even a white man in shorts and armed with a pistol “who happened to be in the area at the time on private business,” the report added. “No one asked him what he was doing there or requested him to leave the scene.”

The crowd was singing freedom songs and shouting abuse at police, but “there is no credible evidence to suggest that the behavior of the crowd was such that the policemen could have reasonably been in fear of their lives or personal safety,” according to the report.

“At most, the behavior of the crowd may have justified the use of tear gas, and then only after a proper warning to disperse,” the report said.

The shooting began with a white constable, who testified that he had pulled his trigger when he saw a stone thrown from the crowd. The gun was loaded with a tear gas canister, but the shot set off a chain reaction among more heavily armed men in the police line.

The crowd then turned and fled. About half of the people injured had been shot in the back, Goldstone said.

Goldstone assigned some blame for the incident to march organizers, saying that the protest had been poorly planned and that there were not enough marshals on hand to control the crowd. But he said that “this (does) not justify in any way the indiscriminate shooting by policemen into the crowd.”

Elsewhere in South Africa on Saturday, leading representatives of Inkatha and the ANC signed an agreement to restore peace in one part of Natal province and expressed the hope that the accord will lead to a national peace plan.

The province has been the scene of three years of bloody factional fighting between supporters of Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha and Nelson Mandela’s ANC. Nearly 4,000 people have died in that conflict, which several weeks ago spread to townships near Johannesburg, where it has claimed more than 500 lives.