Phillip ”Blondie” Bezuidenhout (52), was found guilty in the Harare high court on Monday of murdering a black squatter on his farm in July last year.
Judge Ben Hlatshwayo convicted Bezuidenhout of ”murder with constructive intent” in what was the first fatality of a squatter at the hands of a white landowner in two-and-a-half years of state-driven invasions of white-owned land.
Bezuidenhout pleaded not guilty to murdering Febian Mapenzauswa but guilty to manslaughter. Murder carries the death penalty in Zimbabwean law. Hlatshwayo said he would sit again on Tuesday to consider sentence.
He ruled that Bezuidenhout has deliberately driven his car at a crowd of squatters in the process of occupying his farm in the Odzi district about 320 km east of Harare on July 14 last year, and ran down Mapenzauswa, financial director of a major national company. Bezuidenhout said he was surrounded by squatters and was trying to escape when Mapenzauswa got in the way of his vehicle.
The killing was followed by a rampage of violence and looting of white-owned farms in the area by so-called guerrilla war veterans who claimed that the incident was ”a declaration of war” by white farmers.
Since February 2000, 13 white farmers and 31 farm workers have been murdered. No-one has been prosecuted for any of the killings.
Meanhiwle, thirteen white farmers arrested in Zimbabwe last week for defying government orders to leave their land and make way for black settlers have been freed without charge, a farmers’ group said on Tuesday.
The 13 were released on Monday by a magistrate in the southern sugar cane growing district of Chiredzi, 500 kilometres southeast of Harare, according to farming crisis group, Justice for Agriculture (JAG).
The 13 were arrested on Friday after they failed to apply for extensions to eviction orders filed against them by the government under President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land reform scheme, under which white-owned commercial farms are being seized and redistributed to landless blacks.
The programme has so far seen 95% of white-owned land compulsorily acquired for redistribution to black settlers.
Since August, when a government deadline expired for 2 900 of the country’s 4 500 white farmers to leave their land, police have arrested hundreds of farmers defying the eviction notices.
Scores of the eviction orders issued under the country’s land laws have been overturned by the courts on technical grounds. – Sapa-AFP