Charges have been dropped against four journalists who reported that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had commandeered one of the national airline’s aircraft to take him on holiday, lawyers said on Wednesday.
Vincent Kahiya, editor of the weekly Zimbabwe Independent, the country’s leading non-state newspaper, projects editor Iden Wetherell and reporters Dumisani Muleya and Itai Dzamera were picked up at their homes almost exactly a year ago, held in police cells for a weekend and charged with criminal defamation of Mugabe and his government.
A report in the newspaper, headlined ”Mugabe grabs plane for Far East holiday”, said that the 80-year-old leader had commandeered one of state-owned Air Zimbabwe’s two long-haul aircraft to take him to Geneva, and then used it again to fly him and his family to Malaysia for a seaside holiday.
Controversial information minister Jonathan Moyo denounced the report as blasphemous.
However, on Monday, state prosecutors in the Harare magistrates court agreed to remove the four journalists from remand, said their lawyer Linda Cook. The magistrate said it was ridiculous that they should be on remand for a year, and had ordered the state to give the court a trial date by Monday, she said. The state did nothing and clearly wasn’t in any position to go to trial.
Observers say Mugabe has a long record in his 25-year rule of cancelling Air Zimbabwe’s schedules at short notice and ordering the airline to fly him to his own destinations, stranding scores of enraged passengers and forcing them to wait, sometimes for days, for the next flight.
”Removing them from remand doesn’t necessarily mean that charges have been dropped, but judging from past experience, I don’t believe that they will proceed,” said Cook. ”All of these cases [against the independent press] have been incorrectly brought. The state has had no hope of succeeding.”
The collapse of the case against The Independent was the latest failure by the government to secure a conviction against journalists in its long-running campaign against the country’s independent press. Not a single prosecution brought by the government has succeeded in five years of violent suppression of
the press. – Sapa-dpa