JUSTICE has eluded a nine-year old Mhondoro girl who survived death by a whisker in a suspected ritual murder attack, after her suspected assailant was acquitted by a Harare regional magistrate on the basis of mistaken identity.
BY CHARLES LAITON SENIOR COURT REPORTER
Although the September 27 2013 incident will remain embedded in the girl’s mind, the suspected murderer Ronnie Takaedza walked out of the Harare Magistrates Court a free man after regional magistrate Adonia Masawi acquitted him for lack of evidence last month.
The girl was slit twice on her throat with a knife by an assailant, who now remains at large and on the loose following Takaedza’s acquittal.
The unfortunate victim from Mugari Village was saved by fellow schoolmates who foiled the attempted grisly murder when they approached the scene making noise prompting the assailant to flee.
On the day in question, the girl was walking home alone from school at around 1:30pm using a footpath which passes through the fields near her homestead when, suddenly, she was attacked and hacked.
In her evidence in court, shesaid she allegedly heard Takaedza talking on the phone after cutting her throat inviting his colleagues to come saying “I have done the job you can come now.”
But magistrate Masawi said: “There was most probably a question of mistaken identity. The fact that the witnesses already hated the accused even before the case might easily have prompted them to suspect him.”
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In her chronological order of events, the girl said after being slit on her throat, she fell down bleeding profusely.
At that juncture, her schoolmates started making noise as they approached close to the scene prompting Takaedza to vanish into the bush leaving her lying for dead.
Later, she regained consciousness and managed to stagger to a nearby road where she again collapsed and was found by lying by the roadside in a pool of blood.
