Prosecutors in Zimbabwe on Tuesday rejected evidence by the defence in the treason trial of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, saying it simply tried to cover up a plot to assassinate President Robert Mugabe and stage a coup.
In his closing arguments before the Harare High Court, prosecutor and acting Attorney General Bharat Patel described the evidence by defence witnesses as ”not quite clear”.
”While the defence witnesses have been credible, they failed to explain crucial issues,” he said.
”Is it a flat denial or a plea of entrapment? Are they saying none of this took place or he was trapped? … The witnesses cannot be believed,” Patel said.
The defence called three senior officials of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) — secretary general Welshman Ncube, shadow agriculture minister Renson Gasela and shadow defence minister Giles Mutsekwa — to testify in support of their leader.
Ari Ben Menashe, the owner of Canadian political consulting firm Dickens and Madison, is alleging that Tsvangirai plotted the assassination of Mugabe ahead of 2002 presidential elections that the MDC and the international community said were seriously flawed.
The state’s evidence is based on a secretly recorded grainy and only partially audible videotape of a meeting Tsvangirai attended in Montreal with Ben Menashe.
The language in that videotape, such as ”elimination”, ”terminate”, ”moving Mugabe aside” and ”chaos” clearly showed that Tsvangirai had a sinister motive, Patel argued.
He also said a statement by Tsvangirai that if Mugabe failed to go peacefully ”he will be removed violently” and the opposition leader’s call for sanctions all pointed to sinister motives.
”We would like you to simply reject evidence of Tsvangirai which is simply not credible,” Patel urged the court.
Tsvangirai has denied the conspiracy charges, for which he could face the death sentence if convicted, alleging he was framed by the government in a bid to discredit him ahead of the 2002 polls.
He said he hired Dickens and Madison to carry out lobbying and fund-raising work for his party in the United States and Canada.
Patel said the lobbying and fund-raising were a cover so that the plot to kill Mugabe would appear like an ”accident”.
He described Ben Menashe, the state’s key witness, as ”fairly clear, reliable and a credible witness”.
Ben Menashe said in his evidence that the contract agreement he signed with the MDC gave him a general mandate to help the party carry out the assassination and coup. — Sapa-AFP