A white Zimbabwean farmer narrowly escaped the death penalty when he was jailed for 15 years in the Harare High Court on Tuesday for murdering a black settler on his farm last year.
Judge Ben Hlatshwayo said that Phillip ”Blondie” Bezuidenhout (52) had escaped the death penalty ”by a whisker” when he and two assessors ruled that Bezuidenhout had been ”extremely emotionally disturbed” when he drove through a mob of squatters on a road next to his farm, Tara, in the Odzi district about 250 km east of Harare on July 14 last year.
”Your vehicle was used as a weapon or a gun,” the judge told Bezuidenhout.
He said the farmer acted like ”a bomber who explodes a bomb in a public place.”
Bezuidenhout denied the charge of murder and said instead he was guilty of manslaughter.
He said he panicked and accelerated to escape when he found himself surrounded by a mob, and Febian Mapenzauswa, the financial director of a major national corporation, stepped into the truck’s path and was killed. It was common cause that Mapenzauswa was interested in Bezuidenhout’s farm.
”This case is going to make legal history because someone has been sentenced for murder instead of culpable homicide,” Bezuidenhout’s lawyer, Eric Matinenga said.
Hlatshwayo refused Bezuidenhout permission to appeal against his conviction or sentence, but Matinenga said he would challenge that ruling in the Supreme Court.
Before the judge passed the sentence, Bezuidenhout and his white wife, Agnes, looked anxiously at each other and gestured by drawing a finger across their throats.
He also has a young black common law wife, Sheila Chimutasa.
Bezuidenhout was free on bail for a year after the incident, but was taken back into custody on Monday when Hlatshwayo found him guilty of murder.
In the last two-and-a-half years Bezuidenhout is only the second person to have been convicted of murder. The other was a squatter who shot a passing policeman on an occupied farm in 2000.
One of Bezuidenhout’s relatives said Tara had not been listed for seizure by the government at the time of the killing. Since then, the property had been overrun by squatters and it was now ”derelict.”
Hlatshawayo’s ruling coincides with deepening fears of persecution among the country’s small population of about 40 000 whites, as police continue to arrest white farmers for being on their property, and the humiliating three-day ordeal of arrest and deprivation by authorities of retired judge Fergus Blackie (65).
He was accused of quashing the conviction of a white woman allegedly ”to prevent whites going to gaol.”
Two months ago Blackie ordered the arrest of justice minister Patrick Chinamasa for failing to appear in court to answer charges of contempt of court.
Tara White, the woman whose release was ordered by Blackie, appeared in the Harare Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday on charges of ”attempting to defeat the course of justice.” She was released on bail of
ZD5 000 (R965). – Sapa