The state’s key witness in the trial of Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai for an alleged assassination plot admitted Thursday to having tricked the accused in order to tape incriminating evidence.
Under cross-examination, political consultant Ari Ben Menashe said he and his colleagues had pretended they were ready to help assassinate President Robert Mugabe ahead of an election the latter won last year.
Tsvangirai and two senior officials in his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), party secretary general Welshman Ncube and lawmaker Renson Gasela, have denied the charges and say they were framed by the state.
Ben Menashe told the court that a meeting held in Montreal, Canada, with Tsvangirai ”was to collect evidence about the plot hatched by the MDC and its leadership … to murder the President and do a coup d’etat”.
”At that time we were preparing the evidence for the government of Zimbabwe who needed the evidence,” Ben Menashe said. Two other meetings had been held earlier between the MDC and Ben Menashe in London before the Montreal meeting.
A grainy video tape secretly recorded in Montreal in December 2001 is the main source of evidence being used against Tsvangirai and his associates for a crime that carries a death penalty on conviction.
Ben Menashe said Tsvangirai was made to believe that the meeting in Montreal was to discuss a political transition after Mugabe had been ”eliminated”, but the real aim was ”to collect evidence to show the plot”.
On Monday, Ben Menashe had denied planning to hand over the incriminatory tape to the Zimbabwe government. The defence is trying to prove that Zimbabwean authorities used Ben Menashe to set up Tsvangirai and discredit him ahead of the March 2002 presidential polls, where he was the main challenger to the long-time head of state.
Ben Menashe, a former Israeli intelligency agent turned political consultant, was under cross-examination by the defence as the hearing entered its 14th day. – Sapa-AFP