The treason trial of Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and two senior party officials has been postponed until May 12, state and private newspapers said Friday.
Tsvangirai, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, his secretary general Welshman Ncube and the party’s shadow agriculture minister Renson Gasela are accused of plotting to assassinate President Robert Mugabe.
On Thursday chief defence lawyer George Bizos also applied for the trio’s bail conditions to be relaxed, according to the media reports. The judge is due to make a ruling on the application on Monday.
The postponement of the trial comes at the end of its seventh week. So far the court has heard evidence from five of the 11 state witnesses. The charges against the trio arose after they allegedly approached a Canada-based political consultant, Ari Ben Menashe, and asked him to eliminate Mugabe ahead of last year’s presidential elections.
The state’s case hinges on a secret video recording Ben Menashe made of a meeting he held with Tsvangirai at his Montreal offices, at which the opposition leader allegedly makes incriminatory remarks. The three officials deny the charges, which carry the death
penalty on conviction.
They claim they were set up, and that they did not know Ben Menashe had links with Mugabe’s government. On Thursday Bizos made an application for Ncube’s passport to be returned to him so that he can travel to Canada to instruct a lawyer there about the case. The state opposed the demand.
”It is so highly unlikely that he would not return after given leave to go to Canada for the purpose of this trial,” Bizos said.
Ncube is himself a lawyer. Earlier this week the judge ordered that the same recording equipment used to capture the meeting with Tsvangirai be set up in Canada and run in the presence of lawyers.
The defence team in Zimbabwe says the quality of the video, which the court has found barely audible, might have been deliberately distorted. – Sapa-AFP