REDRESS/AMANI made no serious effort to do so. It is now more than six years since the event and no identification parade has been held, no arrests have been made nor has a single perpetrator ever appeared in court. 132 In February 2005 a Zimbabwe internet news service based in South Africa reported that the Zimbabwe Government had paid Choto and the late Chavunduka’s estate a combined total of Z$24 million (about US$3000 at the time) civil damages for the torture and unlawful detention .133 ̸» ¬±®¬«®» ±º Þ´¿²½¸¿®¼ô Ü·¨±² ¿²¼ 묬·¶±¸² In March 1999 three American nationals were arrested at Harare International Airport on their way to Switzerland. The men, Gary Blanchard, John Dixon and Joseph Pettijohn, were subsequently charged with various statutory offences relating to the illegal possession of firearms. Before trial the men brought an urgent application in the Supreme Court not only stating that they had been severely tortured after their arrest, but that the conditions in which they were being held in a maximum security prison pending trial constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Amongst other things it emerged that the men were held in solitary confinement, stripped naked each night and shackled in leg irons to their beds where the lights in their cells were kept on 24 hours a day. This had gone on for about five weeks. The then Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay found against the State which did not deny the allegations, and ordered a halt to the various forms of illtreatment. As a mark of the court’s disapproval legal costs were awarded to the men on the higher scale. The court also noted that stripping and keeping a prisoner naked from late afternoon until early morning was in contempt of a Supreme Court ruling several years earlier outlawing the practice, and was aggravated by the use of leg-irons.134 Far worse was to emerge at the men’s trial in September 1999. In the days after their arrest they were brutally tortured by police officers of the Criminal Investigation Department, which torture included electric shocks to their genitals and beatings to the soles of their feet. Full details had been given to a magistrate at their first court appearance in March, and their lawyers also sent a detailed report to Attorney General Patrick Chinamasa. At the trial, both State and private doctors gave evidence consistent with what the men had said had happened to them, including blows to the soles of their feet with a blunt instrument. The trial judge concluded that the police had indeed severely tortured the men, and noted that although one Detective Inspector Matema had said the State had been investigating the complaints “the only conclusion this court can come to is either nothing is being done about the complaints or if something is being done, clearly incompetence seems to be the situation, because it does not take four months to come up with a completed investigation about this, in which it has been alleged some twenty different persons were involved.”135 While convicting the men, and following the Supreme Court decisions in S v Michael and S v Kinfe, the trial judge took into account the torture and sentenced each of them to an effective 12 months in prison, back-dated six months to the time of their arrest. Thus after a further six months they were released and deported. The State 132 One of the complainants, Mark Chavanduka, died in October 2002. 133 Zimbabwe Online (SA) 21 February 2005. 134 Blanchard and Others v Minister of Justice 1999 (2) ZLR 24 (S); 1999 (4) SA 1108 (ZS). 135 S v Blanchard and Others 1999 (2) ZLR 168 (H). 25