While Tekere and a number of his heavily armed bodyguards holed up inside, some 40 police gunmen laid siege to the building. Within hours, the cars were traced to a Salisbury apartment complex. The police net closed in on Tekere after his official ministerial car, a blue Jaguar, was seen speeding away from the farm along with a white Mercedes-Benz. Finally, it raised new doubts about the durability of Zimbabwe's new constitutional community.
It sent a jolt of fear through the white community just as whites were beginning to acquire confidence in the new black leadership. It threw Mugabe's faction-ridden ZANU party into confusion. The bizarre episode confronted the newly independent nation of Zimbabwe with its most serious crisis since the end of the Rhodesian civil war.
The possible maximum sentence if he is convicted: death by hanging. He was put into a cell in Salisbury's Chikurubi Prison. Within 48 hours of the crime, the former guerrilla leader was compelled to give himself up to white police officers. He is also the secretary-general of Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and one of southern Africa's most prominent black nationalists. But the killing was different in one important respect: the suspected ringleader of the murdering band was Edgar Tekere, 43, Minister of Manpower, Planning and Development in the four-month-old government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. In many ways, the afternoon raid on Stamford Farm, a large estate southwest of Salisbury, resembled countless other incidents of scattered rural violence by trigger-happy ex-guerrillas. "We scrambled for cover and beat a fast retreat to our cars as the firing got hotter." Returning with police 30 minutes later, they found the farm's white manager, Gerald William Adams, 68, dead with a single bullet in his back. "They just opened fire on us," said Ralph Chadwick, a farm equipment dealer who was visiting the property with two other whites. Their AK-47 rifles started blazing as they walked toward the dilapidated farmhouse. The attackers, some dressed in the olive drab fatigues of bush-hardened guerrillas, approached in an extended line.
0 kommentar(er)
