REDRESS/AMANI The vast majority of victims at all times were black. Senior PF-Zapu leaders such as Sidney Malunga and Welshman Mabhena were tortured along with thousands of ordinary citizens, and their torturers too were not brought to account. 124 In summary, little effort was made to investigate and prosecute torturers. As in colonial times, the only real deterrent was that evidence obtained through torture ran the risk of being excluded, but otherwise there were seldom any legal consequences involving the criminal process. 125 This did not only occur in the 1980s. For example, in 1995 an Eritrean national, Solomon Ghebre Haile Michael, was arrested near the villa of the deposed Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in Harare, and subsequently charged with offences relating to an alleged plot to kill Mengistu. Solomon Michael had been shot and captured by Mengistu’s bodyguards; his alleged accomplice, another Eritrean man named Abrahama Goietom Joseph Kinfe, was arrested the following day. At his trial in 1996, Solomon Michael told the court that after he had been shot he was taken to Mengistu’s house where the former dictator told him that he would personally execute him unless he confessed to having planned an assassination. Here he was brutally tortured – including blows to his right arm where he had been shot - and taken to a civilian hospital, where the torture continued, including beatings, while he was refused medical treatment except for being placed on a drip. He was then told that he was being taken away to be executed, but was deposited in a military hospital where he was chained to a bed and threatened with an injection with blood tainted with the virus HIV. Solomon Michael was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for illegal weapons possession. Abrahama Kinfe was sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy to murder. Like Solomon Michael, Abrahama Kinfe also said the police had severely tortured him after his arrest. On appeal in 1998, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions but cut the men’s jail terms to two years each; as they had already served more than this the court ordered their immediate release. The Supreme Court accepted that both men had been severely tortured after their arrest. 126 The Zimbabwe authorities have never taken any steps against the torturers of Solomon Michael and Abrahama Kinfe. 124 Breaking the Silence (supra) at pp. 70-71. Malunga, for example, suffered severe beatings to his feet. See also the case of Minister of Home Affairs v Dabengwa and Another 1982 1 ZLR 681 (SC). See also Individual Freedoms and State Security in the African Context (supra) at pp. 74-77 for graphic details of some of the torture methods used by the CIO and ZRP in the 1980s, which emerged during trials of torture victims, and in which the State often did not even seek to dispute the evidence; further accounts of brutalities committed by the authorities emerged in trials which are reviewed in The Constitutional Recognition and Popular Enjoyment of Human Rights in Zimbabwe, W. Ncube, The Zimbabwe Law Review, Volume 5, 1987, pp. 78-88. 125 Many cases were dismissed on the grounds of accused persons having been tortured: see Breaking the Silence (supra) at p. 69, where reference is also made to serious charges against one Abednico Sibibndi having been dismissed on the grounds that he had been treated “ quite outrageously ” . This was by no means an isolated case. Probably the only time when there was a chance of a torturer being prosecuted was if he went too far and the victim died, but even then a prosecution would be the exception rather than the norm. Furthermore, even in political cases relatively few victims died in police custody as such, although thousands were killed in the rural areas during Gukurahundi. Even when justice had been allowed to take its course, Mugabe would sometimes intervene. One of the most flagrant examples involved two CIO attempted murderers, Kanengoni and Chivamba, who shot and seriously injured an opposition candidate, Patrick Kombayi, prior to the 1990 election. They were tried and convicted in the High Court and sentenced to prison, but the day the Supreme Court rejected their appeals, they were pardoned by Mugabe. Despite a public outcry, no reason was ever given. 126 S v Michael S-59-98; S v Kinfe S-60-98. The sentences were reduced because of the “ highly mitigatory features”of the case: both men and their families had also suffered torture under Mengistu’s rule in Ethiopia and it was not disputed at their trial that they were the victims of a brutal dictatorship that “ killed thousands of people in order to break their will and wipe out any resistance”to Mengistu. Mengistu still has safe-haven in Zimbabwe to this day, nearly 15 years after fleeing Addis Ababa. 23