More Evidence Surfaces Linking Minister to Murder

SW Radio Africa (London)

Lance Guma

27 May 2011

The niece of a Lutheran World Federation employee murdered in 1999, has told SW Radio Africa that co-Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi wrote a letter asking to meet her uncle Strover Mutonhori, around the time of the kidnapping.

Speaking on our Behind the Headlines series Jane Dongo told us that Mohadi, who was then Deputy Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, wrote a letter to Mutonhori asking to meet him at the Ambassador Hotel in Harare. Mohadi did not say why he wanted the meeting but offered to take him back home at the end of it.

Sensing something was wrong Mutonhori is said to have declined to meet the Deputy Minister. It’s suspected that Mohadi was following up on allegations that Mutonhori was having an affair with his wife, Tambudzani. The two worked together in Mberengwa. Dongo told us they are in possession of a letter written by Tambudzani to Mutonhori, but in the letter she only discusses the degree program the two were doing at the time.

Because Mutonhori declined to meet Mohadi the family believe that a further plot was hatched to set him up for the kidnapping several days later. Dongo said what puzzles them is that Mutonhori was not supposed to be at work on the day he was kidnapped, “he was off duty but was called and told – you have got to attend it, you have got to attend it.” Eventually he went to the workshop at the Omadu Hotel in Kezi.

Mutonhori played soccer that night and around 9pm went to his room. Dongo said delegates to the workshop were booked into rooms in pairs but somebody tampered with the arrangement and gave Mutonhori his own room to ensure he was alone. He was told that the person booked in the room with him was no longer coming since they lived in Bulawayo and would come to workshop the following day.

Dongo said Mutonhori’s kidnapping was meticulously planned. She said the bed was never used on the night. “Mutonhori was kidnapped with one shoe, one sock. The two hundred Zim dollars which was in his purse was there, the cell phone was there, the suitcase with his clothes was there. Only him and one trainer and one sock were missing.”

Mutonhori went missing on the 1st March and his decomposing body was only found on the 17th August at the Whitewaters Range in Matopos, “just bones, sheer bones,” Dongo said. Mutonhori’s wife was able to identify his remains by counting the number of teeth he had in the upper jaw. “She only identified those bones with one tooth which was missing and a belt which he was wearing on that particular day.”

When Mohadi was appointed Home Affairs Minister in 2002, investigations into the case were dropped and evidence went missing.

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