Guard tells inquiry he expressed major concerns about crisis response before disturbance that led to death of Reza Barati





A Manus Island detention centre guard says he described the facility as a “tinderbox ready to ignite” and expressed serious concerns about crime scene preservation training months before the disturbances that led to the death of an Iranian asylum seeker.

A Senate inquiry is investigating events at the processing centre in January, which led to injuries for dozens of asylum seekers and the death of one, Reza Barati. The Papua New Guinea police are investigating the death but no charges have been laid at this stage.

In one of the first submissions made public for the inquiry, Paul Skillen, who was employed as a supervisor at the facility until March, has submitted what appear to be emails to other G4S staff, outlining major concerns about training and crisis response procedures at the facility in November last year.

In the submission, Skillen says staff with no supervisory experience, no knowledge of incident response training and limited leadership capabilities were placed in senior incident response roles. He is also critical of the training received by local contractors.

“As you will see from the content of the emails I previously forwarded,” he says, “although the PNG nationals were keen, and willing to learn, the level of training was woeful, and I was gravely concerned that the tension was rising within the centre and they would not be up to the task of dealing with a serious disorder.”

After an attempted hanging, Skillen describes having to place evidence in black bin bags because proper evidence collection tools were not available, and says that: “It was very apparent from the incident this morning, that even basic scene preservation training is needed.”

“If we are unlucky enough to have a death in custody, we may all end up before a PNG coroner, and these simple steps would assist us and the PNG constabulary greatly,” he writes in the email.

In another email he writes that the incident responses training and leadership could leave both G4S and the individuals concerned “liable should anything untowards occur”.

Guardian Australia has previously revealed that G4S managers “lost control” of the local riot squad and members of the team “dispersed into the immediate area of Mike compound,” according to official incident logs from G4S.



A spokesman for G4S said the company denied the allegations made in the submissions and would be addressing them in its own submission to the Senate inquiry, as well as a range of other matters.

In a separate submission, one of the architects of Australia’s offshore processing regime says the Manus Island processing centre is not meeting basic human rights standards.

The former Labor government reintroduced a regional processing centre on Manus Island after an expert panel recommended establishing a broader regional framework for asylum seekers in the Asia-Pacific. The panel recommended establishing a centre in Papua New Guinea with appropriate accommodation, physical and mental health services and asylum claim processing and assistance.

But one of the panel members, Paris Aristotle, has written to the Senate inquiry investigating disturbances at the Manus Island facility, in his role as CEO of Foundation House, indicating that he does not believe the processing centre is meeting the human rights standards set out in that report.

“The current government has not resiled from the recommendation that the treatment of people transferred to PNG should be in accordance with international human rights standards,” Aristotle wrote, but “reports from UNHCR and other sources indicate strong concerns that the recommendation has not been comprehensively and properly implemented.”