Before he died, former defence forces commander General Solomon Mujuru met the Central Intelligence Organization hitman who later shot him and set his house on fire charring him, it has been revealed.
According to investigations by N4 (pronounced Info), a South African research and intelligence firm contracted by Mujuru’s creditors, insurers, business partners and wealthy friends, the assassin was paid $2-3 million for the job of eliminating the Zanu PF politburo member who had clashed with president Robert Mugabe for refusing to step down or name a successor.
The sources said the probe was prompted by reports that $4 billion realised mostly from illegal diamond mining had vanished from Mujuru’s offshore accounts. Mujuru’s insurers are also anxious to know the cause of the general’s death after claims by the president’s wife Grace Mugabe that Mujuru had been murdered by his wife Joice Mujuru who then looted $9 billion from his estate at the expense of the general’s children with other women.
Joice Mujuru has said she knows the killers of her husband but refused to make their names public.
STRANGE MEETING
Informants told the investigators that the man suspected to be behind the Mujuru murder, identified only by his nom de guerre ‘Sauti’ had visited the small farming town of Beatrice, 50 kilometres south of Harare on a mission to ‘certify the mark’. The killer found Mujuru drinking with three friends at the Beatrice Motel.
Sauti walked up to the general and saluted, according to the sources. Mujuru asked him what his name was and he told him.
“Mujuru was agitated because he knew Sauti’s reputation. He asked Sauti who he was looking for and who had sent him. Sauti merely said he was there to drink and after a few beers he left,” said one of the men present with the general.
Mujuru did not wait for Sauti to go, however, the sources said. He was terrified at meeting the gunman. The general grabbed his car keys and left the motel without telling anyone, including his driver and bodyguard. Sauti, then a youthful soldier in his 20s, was notorious for hits in the Democratic Republic of Congo and for operating as a freelance gunman in the Gulf of Aden where he reportedly disarmed a gang of Somali pirates all by himself.
MURDER
Investigators have not been able to establish if Sauti was alone on the night of Mujuru’s murder in August 2011 or if he had a handful of other people with him, which is said to be highly probable. Whistleblower group Zimbabweans for Prosperity have claimed that Fidelis Fengu, whom it accused of being a CIO assassin was also involved in the attack. Fengu has since denied the charges and claimed he was not in Zimbabwe when the Mujuru assassination was carried out on a farm which the general seized forcibly from a white couple.
Apparently there is no ongoing police investigation after witnesses told the court that Mujuru accidentally burnt his farm house with a candle while he was drunk.-Online
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