BUSINESSMAN Frank Buyanga’s former wife Chantelle Muteswa has filed a letter of complaint to Police Commissioner-General Godwin Matanga, the Judicial Service Commission and the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission challenging cancellation of Buyanga’s warrant of arrest by a Harare magistrate.
Muteswa says cancellation of the warrant of arrest, which
led to Buyanga’s release from a South African remand prison was a potential act
of corruption by provincial magistrate Learnmore Mapiye, who she now wants
investigated.
She says she received a letter from Buyanga on October 27,
through his lawyers Rubaya and Chatambudza Legal Practitioners over a matter
she was never seized with.
Mapiye then allegedly dispatched her subordinate magistrate
Judith Taruvinga, who is stationed at Civil Courts through an email to go to
Rotten Row Magistrates Court to sit and hear Rubaya’s application for Buyanga.
“I am advised that Mapiye’s initial instruction was for the
warrant to be cancelled in chambers and not in open court. Although I was not
copied that letter, which I got wind of from well-wishers who were aggrieved by
the preferential treatment of Sadiqi (Buyanga), and, or his legal
practitioners, I instructed my legal practitioners to advise Mapiye and the
Chief Magistrate of the folly of the proposed course of action and object to it
in a letter dated 28 October 2022. This was done,” Muteswa wrote.
“Sometime around 14 November 2022 around 1435 hours, my
legal practitioners received a telephone call that an application for the
cancellation of the warrant issued on 24 April 2020 was being heard. I have now
become aware that the purported application had been brought that morning,
served on the State, it had been set down for 1415 hours and was being heard.
My legal practitioners were advised that the prosecutors at Rotten Row were
ignorant of how the matter had been set down. It is now clear that a document
titled “notice of set down” had been brought by Rubaya and Chatambudza directly
and exclusively to Mapiye to the utmost exclusion of the Clerk of Court — a
procedure which I am told is unknown to our court process.”
Muteswa said she had found the action by Mapiye to be out
of order, and demanded investigations by authorities.
Buyanga was issued a warrant of arrest for kidnapping his
son and he was placed on Interpol red notice as a result.
The businessman was then arrested and remanded in custody
at Sun City Correctional Facility in South Africa pending his indictment.
However, his Zimbabwean lawyer Admire Rubaya filed the
cancellation of the warrant of arrest before a Harare magistrate citing that it
was issued in error, and the application was upheld by magistrate Taruvinga.
Newsday
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