"No Evidence To Convict Henrietta Rushwaya"
Chief Public Prosecutor Tawanda Zvekare says the prosecuting arm does not have enough evidence to convict Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) boss Henrietta Rushwaya in her gold smuggling allegations.
Rushwaya was caught trying to smuggle 6.9kg of gold at Robert Mugabe International Airport in October 2020.
Zvekare, speaking at the launch of launch of the 2022 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report recently, said the NPA was struggling to get enough evidence against Rushwaya, as well as forrmer government minister Prisca Mupfumira, who is accused of corruption. He said:
For the serious cases which you were talking about, that’s Henrietta Rushwaya case, the Prisca Mupfumira case and like cases, I would want to say that the threshold for proving a criminal case is proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is a high threshold. It may not be discharged easily.
As NPA, we depend on the investigators, that is the police, that is ZACC.
If they give us a good docket, with enough evidence, we will not fail you. We will do our bit.
But at times we are not given good cases to prosecute, so to speak by the investigators and we would be compromised in our discharge of our mandate as prosecutors.
This is why some cases, which may be obvious to you, that this is an obvious conviction, may not be necessarily so because of various factors.
I can give an example of a soccer match, we are strikers and if the midfielders who are the investigators give us poor passes, we cannot score.
Rushwaya, who also accused of trying to bribe an airport official on allow her to travel out of the country with the gold, has been cleared of the charges.
