Court Overruled

Clapping the acquitted in irons

The verdict brought cheers from the packed gallery in Zimbabwe's High Court. Air Force Chief of Staff Hugh Slatter and his five co-defendants and fellow officers, ruled Judge Enoch Dumbutshena, were innocent of charges that they had aided in a devastating sabotage attack on Zimbabwe's air force in 1982. The government's case against the officers, he declared, rested on inadmissible confessions extracted under torture.

It was a brief respite. Within 15 minutes, as the crowd shouted, "Shame, shame," guards had reshackled the prisoners and led them back to their cells. The government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe was detaining the officers without charges under Zimbabwe's broad Law and Order Maintenance Act, announced Minister of Home Affairs Herbert Ushewokunze, because their release would "be a danger to public safety and order."

The decision brought a flood of protests. Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe's principal political rival, denounced the move as reminiscent of arbitrary arrests made under the white-dominated rule of Prime Minister Ian Smith. Four of the six men hold dual Zimbabwe-British citizenship, and last week the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed its "very great concern" over the incident.

The officers, all of them white, were accused of abetting saboteurs from neighboring South Africa who destroyed or damaged about 25% of Zimbabwe's combat aircraft with phosphorus grenades in a midnight raid a year ago on Thornhill air force base in the Zimbabwe midlands. They were brought to court in May and faced maximum penalties of death or life imprisonment.

The 44-day trial drew capacity crowds, including families of the accused, Air Force and Army officers and observers from the U.S. and British embassies. In arguments before Dumbutshena, who is Zimbabwe's first black judge, the government prosecutor used signed confessions from the defendants to bolster claims that the men were recruited for the attack by South African agents. According to the prosecution, one officer admitted the bombing was intended to bring about the fall of Mugabe's government.

In response, the defendants charged that they had been tortured into making false confessions. Wing Commander John Cox told the court that his interrogators rubbed a "red-hot wire brush" between his buttocks, then tortured him with electric shocks. After the ordeal, he testified, "I asked them what they wanted me to say."

Other officers gave similarly lurid accounts. Air Commodore Philip Pile claimed that he was taken into the bush and told he would be shot unless he confessed. Flight Lieut. Harrington Lloyd testified that after a night of electric-shock treatments, he slashed his wrists with glass from his spectacles and scrawled TORTURE WITH BATTERIES on the cell wall before being hospitalized for blood loss. Expert witnesses agreed that the defendants' physical condition was consistent with their testimony. All six men said that they had been denied access to lawyers during the early days of their detention.

In finding the officers innocent, Dumbutshena said their stories of mistreatment had "the ring of truth," while the government had mustered "very little incriminating evidence." Dumbutshena, however, is powerless to dismiss the new government detention order. It will confine the men indefinitely while a tribunal evaluates the government's case for jailing them. The order continues a disturbing trend in Zimbabwe: in the past year, eight other people found not guilty of security-related crimes have nevertheless been rearrested without charge. Increasingly, it seems, Mugabe is uncomfortable leaving justice in the hands of the courts. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.