Werner Menges
16 April 2008
Windhoek — Stock theft charges that two of the men being prosecuted in the main Caprivi high treason trial have faced since mid-2006 were dismissed in the Katima Mulilo Regional Court yesterday.
Former National Assembly Member Geoffrey Mwilima (52), one of his co-accused in the Caprivi high treason trial, Gabriel Mwilima (46), and the latter's wife, Betty Mwilima (42), were acquitted on all charges that they faced in the Katima Mulilo Regional Court after the prosecution had closed its case against them yesterday.
Their defence lawyer, Jorge Neves, asked Magistrate William Kasitomo to discharge them at the close of the State's case, arguing that the prosecution had not managed to prove that they had committed any of the alleged crimes they were accused of. The Magistrate ruled in Neves's favour, finding that there was not sufficient evidence before him on which a reasonable court could convict the three accused persons. He noted that there was no duty on an accused person to prove his or her innocence, and that an accused should not be called upon to fill gaps in the prosecution's case. Amongst the problems that the prosecution is understood to have experienced with the trial of the three, which started on Monday, was an apparent confusion by State witnesses about dates when events at the centre of the case supposedly took place.
The charges against the three date back more than nine years - to January 1999, when the Deputy Sheriff for the Katima Mulilo district placed 140 head of cattle belonging to exiled alleged secessionist leader Mishake Muyongo after judgements over unpaid debts had been granted against Muyongo.
Betty Mwilima is a daughter of Muyongo, while Geoffrey Mwilima is a cousin of the former DTA President and Gabriel Mwilima is Muyongo's son-in-law. It was alleged that after the Deputy Sheriff had attached the cattle, the three accused persons went to the place where the cattle were being kept and had them driven off from there. The three accused persons denied all charges. They faced counts of stock theft, alternatively theft, and contravening the Agricultural Bank Act by obstructing or hindering the sale of property, or knowingly disposing of goods that are under judicial attachment in terms of the Act. Muyongo left Namibia to Botswana with an allegedly armed group of close to 100 men, claimed to have been members of a separatist organisation created by Muyongo in the Caprivi Region, during the last days of October 1998.
Having left unpaid debts behind in Namibia, civil judgements were granted against Muyongo at the request of the Agricultural Bank of Namibia, the Namibia Development Corporation, and the DTA of Namibia, which he had formerly led.
It was as a result of these judgements that Muyongo's cattle herd was attached. The Deputy Sheriff laid a charge of theft in November 1999 after realising that most of the attached cattle had in the meantime disappeared. By that time, Geoffrey and Gabriel Mwilima had already been in Police custody for more than three months, having been arrested in the days after the alleged secessionist attacks at Katima Mulilo on August 2 1999.
They and Betty Mwilima were eventually charged in mid-2006. Public Prosecutor Pieter Smit presented the State's case to the court this week.
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