Mnangagwa bombing still under investigation

Published: 25 June 2019

SUNDAY marked a year after President Emmerson Mnangagwa narrowly escaped an assassination attempt following a bomb explosion that rocked a Zanu-PF rally at White City Stadium.

The blast which occurred on June 23 last year claimed lives of two security aides, while scores of Zanu-PF supporters, including top government officials, were injured.

Almost a month after the incident, Mnangagwa told Zanu-PF candidates who excelled in the harmonised polls that "we now have the knowledge of who did it". Despite police dangling a $100 000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspects; it seems no inroads have been made till to date.

Police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi yesterday said the matter was still under investigation.

"That case is under investigation and there is a team that is in Bulawayo working on the matter," that's all Nyathi could say when contacted by Daily News.

As the hunt for suspects intensified days after the explosion, police arrested and briefly dragged to court two suspects - Douglas Musekiwa and John Zulu - from Old Pumula suburb.

After having spent almost a week in incarceration, it later turned out that the suspects were merely touts operating from Old Pumula Bus Terminus.

They were released as the law enforcers apparently failed to stitch up evidence against them.

In a desperate bid to get to the bottom of the matter, government hired seven Belarusian ballistics experts to assist the multi-agency security team investigating the grenade attack.

This brought the number of foreign investigators assisting the local team to 11 after four Russian experts had earlier on reportedly been engaged into the investigations as well.

Police sources then revealed that the investigations by the Russians revealed that the explosive used in carrying out the attack was a grenade made in the former Soviet Union, which was lobbed towards the direction of Mnangagwa and his entourage as they were leaving the high table.

Observers have strongly argued that the bomb blast was an inside job, mostly likely to have been fuelled by the factional tensions in the ruling Zanu-PF party.

In an interview with the BBC in July last year, Mnangagwa gave credence to these suspicions when he told the interviewer that his "hunch without evidence" was that loyalists of former president Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace, were behind the attack.

Political analyst Dumisani Nkomo yesterday said it was a curious situation because "it either means the State apparatus which is tasked with investigating is clueless and incompetent and probably good at intimidating unarmed civilians or the whole thing is an inside job or a smokescreen.

"Surely how can the country be safe when those mandated to do so are still to have arrested a single person or produced a conclusive report such a long time afterwards?"
- dailynews

Tags: Mnangagwa,