Source: The Herald – Breaking news.
Danisa Masuku
DOUBLE murder convict Rodney Tongai Jindu stood before a Bulawayo High Court Judge yesterday for re-sentencing and broke down as he received two life sentences.
Jindu committed the callous murders of his two friends in 2017, for which he was initially sentenced to death.
However, following President Mnangagwa’s abolition of the death penalty last year, a re-sentencing hearing was mandated.
For each murder count, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
His legal representatives, Bob Sansole and Dixon Abraham, conveyed their client’s remorse for the double killings, portraying him as a reformed individual who now dedicated himself to reading the Bible and had turned to religion.
Representing the State, deputy prosecutor-general for the Southern region, Mrs Tariro Rosa Takuva, argued that the accused had committed two murders under severely aggravating circumstances, both of which were premeditated.
Mrs Takuva pointed out that the second count involved the murder of Cyprian Kudzurunga during the commission of a robbery. In delivering the sentence, Justice Nokuthula Moyo stressed that Jindu had committed the offences in aggravating circumstances by fatally shooting his victims.
The judge also noted his apparent lack of compassion and failure to express remorse, highlighted by his not sending emissaries to apologise to the parents of either deceased. She deemed his courtroom apology an afterthought.
Justice Moyo dismissed Jindu’s defence that he was under the influence of drugs when he heartlessly murdered his two friends, stating that he did not deserve to be part of society, having begun a life of crime with such extreme acts.
She further stated that the murders were committed using a dangerous weapon, a firearm, and involved the mutilation of body parts.
Shockingly, the whereabouts of these body parts remain unknown.
Mrs Takuva described this as the most heinous type of murder committed under aggravating circumstances.
This publication first reported the chilling details of his cold-blooded murder of his childhood friend, Kudzurunga, a young man of just 28, whose remains he heartlessly buried in a shallow grave on a property in Bulawayo’s affluent Burnside suburb.
Jindu disturbingly confessed to investigators that he murdered Kudzurunga out of fear – the fear of exposure.
Kudzurunga, it was alleged, had inadvertently discovered evidence of Jindu’s ritualistic murder of Mboneli Ncube.
In a calculated attempt to conceal his horrific actions, Jindu even sent a deceptive message to Kudzurunga’s mother, impersonating her son and falsely claiming a sudden departure from the country.
While the public was still reeling from the sheer horror of this revelation, Jindu, already a figure of morbid fascination both within Zimbabwe and internationally, committed another atrocity, plunging the nation into further despair.
He chillingly recounted to detectives from the Homicide division how a cross-border transporter had approached him, offering a gruesome exchange: US$20 000 or a Toyota Quantum vehicle for the body parts of Mboneli Ncube.
This grotesque proposition, he claimed, ignited his desire to murder his friend, Mboneli, a 30-year-old who lived just four houses away in Bulawayo’s Glengarry suburb.
Shortly thereafter, he delivered Ncube’s lifeless body to the transporter, who proceeded to remove the head, hands, and both legs, leaving Jindu with the torso.
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