By Basildon Peta and Brian Latham
Rampaging war veterans who killed farmer David Stevens drank his blood after mixing it with alcohol, the Zimbabwe High Court has heard.
The blood-drinking revelation was made by an eyewitness who testified against four ruling Zanu-PF party militants charged with the April 2000 murder of Stevens, a farmer and opposition political activist, in Macheke, 160km east of Harare.
The militants were the first to be tried in connection with the deaths of 12 white farmers who were butchered by President Robert Mugabe's supporters after the Zimbabwean government unleashed them on a violent campaign to seize and occupy white-owned farms in 2000.
Continues Below ↓
| 'They shared it among themselves' |
More than 200 black opposition activists have also been killed over the same period.
The high court heard that a group of ruling-party militants occupying Stevens's Arizona Farm abducted the farmer after some differences with him and frogmarched him to their office in the nearby Murehwa district.
Stevens was beaten heavily before being dragged to a nearby burial shrine for heroes of Zimbabwe's 1970s war of independence from Britain. There Stevens was shot dead.
"One of them knelt over Stevens's body and filled a container with blood, which they mixed with alcohol and shared among themselves," the eyewitness, who cannot be named for his protection, told High Court Judge Benjamin Paradza.
He said he saw three of the 10 ruling-party militants present, who had been allegedly drinking heavily that night, drink Stevens's blood.
The editor of Zimbabwe's independent Daily News, Geoff Nyarota, has again been charged under the country's notorious Public Order and Safety Act. It is the sixth time Nyarota has been charged since February 2000.
Police charged him with publishing a story that undermined the public's confidence in the police. Nyarota denied the charge on Thursday, saying the story that detailed the torture of opposition MDC youth activist Tom Spicer was not false. - Independent Foreign Service
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
