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MDC men acquitted after marathon court case
SAPA-DPA
August 05, 2004

http://www.iol.co.za/general/newsview.php?art_id=qw1091726464619B251&click_id=2646&set_id=1

Harare - A controversial year-long murder trial that revealed torture and a state plot to incriminate six members of Zimbabwe's main opposition party in the killing a ruling party activist ended on Thursday with their acquittal. Fletcher Dulini Ncube, national executive member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and five junior party members were discharged by Harare High Court judge Sandra Mungwira, who said that state lawyers had failed to produce any evidence against them. She said police witnesses were manifestly unreliable and the confessions obtained from them one of them under torture and used against them were inadmissible. They were accused of abducting and strangling Cain Nkala, a leading member of the notorious war veterans militia of President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party in 2002.

The ruling is seen as a major embarrassment to Mugabe, who turned the killing into a major political strategy against the MDC. He declared at Nkala burial at Heroes Acre, the shrine outside for Harare reserved for ruling party officials, that the killing proved that the MDC was a party of violence and urged party supporters to extract vengeance from the opposition party. Now, opposition figures said, the blame for the murder points to the regime. Mugabe's rhetoric was followed by a series of violent mob attacks on the MDC, the burning of offices and assaults and abductions of hundreds of members in a wave of terror shortly before presidential elections in 2002.

The MDC six were arrested soon after Nkalas abduction in November 2001. Ncube lost an eye in detention after officials refused to allow him to see a doctor.Three of the group spent 21 months in appalling conditions in jail as authorities repeatedly ignored court orders for their release. The whole courtroom shrieked when the judgement was handed down, and people started crying, said Edith Mushore, one of the defence team. "This is a very serious indictment against the police and the intelligence services," said David Coltart, the MDC's legal director. "It raises the question, who killed Cain Nkala? Zanu PF has a long history of killing their own to achieve their political objectives." He said he expected Zimbabwe's attorney-general to pursue the case, and look closer to home for the answers.

Nkala was himself arrested in 2001 in the western city of Bulawayo over the abduction and death of an MDC official a year earlier. During the trial of the MDC six, evidence was led that he had named senior government officials as the killers of the abducted MDC official. Soon after, Nkala disappeared, and his body was found in a shallow grave outside Bulawayo. The six MDC officials were arrested and charged with murdering him. Defence lawyers challenged police evidence, and were granted a special hearing to examine their statements. After months of a trial-within-a-trial, judge Mungwira ruled in March that the police investigating the killing had shamelessly lied. She described the state case as surreal and said the police investigation record was an appalling piece of fiction. She found that police had arrested the six and accused them of murder before it was known that Nkala was dead. She also accepted evidence that a shadowy third force, comprising secret police, soldiers and war veterans, had been controlling the police investigation. After she gave her ruling in March, state prosecutors said they would bring new witnesses. None were produced, and the judge pronounced her verdict.

Lawyers said the judge had delivered her ruling in an atmosphere of intimidation by the government to produce a guilty verdict. Through much of the trial, she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. "She's a very brave woman," said one of the defence team. All of the defence advocates said they were trailed by secret police during the trial, and repeatedly received threatening telephone calls.

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