Source: Tsvangirai aide torture case on today – DailyNews Live
Tendai Kamhungira 26 April 2017
HARARE – The High Court is today set to hear an appeal by MDC leader
Morgan Tsvangirai’s spokesperson, Luke Tamborinyoka, who says he was
tortured while in police custody.
Tamborinyoka is seeking to have police commissioner-general Augustine
Chihuri and other officials held accountable.
He is demanding $200 000 compensation from the State after he was brutally
attacked by Harare Central Police Station-based cops in 2007.
The trained journalist is pursuing the application, initially lodged in
2007, and is now seeking the court to amend the papers for the claim to be
made in United States dollars.
When he initially made the application, Tamborinyoka was seeking Z$20
billion, but now wants it to be substituted with $200 000.
In the application, Tamborinyoka is suing Home Affairs minister Ignatius
Chombo, Chihuri, assistant commissioner Musarashana Mabunda, police
officers only identified as J Chani and Kambanje, and the
officer-in-charge CID Law and Order.
He argued that his application for amendment is premised on the basis that
the Zimbabwean dollar is no longer legal tender, since adoption of the
multi-currency system in 2009.
“For this reason, it is no longer tenable or proper for me to persist with
my prayer for relief that sounds in a retired or decommissioned currency.
This leaves me with no choice but to seek that my claim be amended by the
deletion of the local currency wherever it is mentioned and its
substitution with United States dollars which is officially legal tender
having been approved through the Finance Act (No.2) of 2009,” Tamborinyoka
said.
The incident leading to the current litigation took place in March 2007,
when police made a surprise raid of MDC headquarters, Harvest House in the
Harare CBD, and arrested Tamborinyoka together with several others.
“At the time of the arrest, no warrant of arrest had been issued against
plaintiff (Tamborinyoka). Plaintiff had not committed any offence. He was
neither in the act of committing nor on the verge of committing an
offence. There was no reasonable suspicion that plaintiff had committed or
was about to commit any offence,” Tamborinyoka said in his court papers.
He said he was not informed of the reasons for the arrest, but was
subsequently charged, resulting in him spending two-and-a-half-months in
remand prison. The charges against him were subsequently dropped and he
claims that his arrest was therefore unlawful.
Before his release, he had been subjected to interrogations and assaults
by police officers.
“The assailants, who were more than five in number, were using a baseball
stick, metal objects, open hands, fists, booted feet and all sorts of
weaponry.
“Plaintiff, together with fellow detainees, was forced to lie on their
bellies facing the floor. They were made to make different noises
resembling nocturnal animals and birds,” Tamborinyoka said.
He said during his detention, he was denied the right to legal
representation, food, medication among other rights.
“Plaintiff contends that the conduct of the police towards him was
unjustified and in flagrant breach of plaintiff’s fundamental rights
embodied in national and international human rights frameworks. In
particular, the treatment of plaintiff at the hands of the police was
inhuman (and) degrading…,” he said, adding that the treatment was
unnecessary, malicious and vindictive.
He said as a result of the unlawful arrest, unlawful deprivation of
liberty and malicious prosecution, he was entitled to compensation.
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