One Bad Thief Catches Another

At Southerton Police Station, they live life on its very edge.

Nights when a patrol goes through with no action are a rarity; there is always something happening within the borders of the police precinct to keep cops on patrol occupies throughout the night. During one night late last year, they were passing by a garage just behind the police station itself when a commuter omnibus that looked to have put up for the night just bolted out of the blue, dropping a suspicious paper bag, which later turned out to be full of explosives. That explained why the station had been receiving a lot of theft cases where safes had been blown up by explosives and ransacked of their belongings, most of which were cash.

Then the other time police officers on patrol in the Lochinvar area were joined by their Officer-in-Charge, Inspector Douglas Chiripanyanga who was doing his Visiting Officers’ rounds – and suddenly they disturbed thieves who were draining fuel from one of the mobile phone boosters in the area. Their attempt to chase the car proved futile, because the getaway vehicle was more powerful than their modest ramshackle and it wound its way out of their grasp in no time. By the time they gave up chase, it was late and the police were tired, so Insp Chiripanyanga told his driver to take him home. But on the way to the OIC’s residence in Highfield New Camp, what would they see parked along the Willovale road side, but the car they had been chasing all night! The cat and mouse game was reignited, but this time the suspect’s car got involved in an accident, and the driver finally had nowhere to run. 

“We get all sorts of calls from everywhere at any time of the day,” said Insp Chiripanyanga. “It is such a relationship we have forged with our people that they trust us to be there whenever and wherever they need us. And we do not want to let them down.”

Hence the dramatic way of life as a police officer at Southerton Police Station in Harare South District, Harare Province. But then, if your policing area includes two very busy tobacco sales floors and the intersection of Simon Mazorodze and Willovale Roads, living life on the edge is Hobson’s choice for you.

Famously known as PaRothmans, the intersection has given the combined policing efforts of Waterfalls, Southerton and Stodart many a sleepless night; with people being robbed and raped by offenders who would vanish into the night’s darkness, or be swallowed by the numerous alleys meandering their way in the surrounding industrial area.

“We would conduct patrols – at one time we even set up a base tent at the place, but the thieves knew of our movements. If we responded to a distress call in one direction, we would come back to learn that a person had been attacked in the opposite direction.”

It so happened one day in April that two women were walking along Willowvale Road on their way to Highfield from work. It was around 6PM and the orange remnants of a sun kissing this side of the earth goodbye for the day were still glowing in the west. But as the two women approached the bridge halfway between Simon Mazorodze and Harare Drive, they were surprised by two men who materialised out of the earth and dragged the women in different directions.

Narrated Insp Chiripanyanga; “The lady who first made it to the police station told us that her attacker had demanded money from her. But she had told him that she had no money on her – that was why she was walking home in the first place. Then he had demanded that she surrender her cellular phone, and when she did that he wanted more. He wanted sex, so he ordered her to strip.

“Starring at the prospect of rape in the face, the women had to use her wits if she was to emerge from this situation alive and with the cell phone the only thing robbed of her person. She knew she could not overpower a big man and disarm him of his scary knife. So she told him he could go ahead and rape her – if he was not scared of contracting HIV.”

The offender hesitated at that; and when he uncertainly accused her of lying, the woman knew she had to grab her chance now. She told him that she had actually dropped her anti-retroviral drugs while her tormentor was busy dragging her to his lair, and if he thought she was lying they could go looking for tablets in the direction they had come from. The robber agreed.

“They started retracing their steps back to the road, with the unsuspecting robber busy looking for proof that he could not have his way with his prey. But he was shocked to hear the woman suddenly shouting and waving her hands in the air. He had not realised that they were back on Willowvale Road and the woman was now attracting the attention of motorists and other people passing by on foot. He turned and took to his heels.”

By the time the police had gotten the story out of the robbery survivor and rushed to rescue her friend, they discovered she had not been so lucky; she had been raped and robbed of her phone as well. 

“It was not even dark,” said the 24-year-old young woman, who preferred that her identity be kept secret. “And we were walking on the grass patch demarcating the dual carriageway. My friend and I saw these two men walking behind us and we thought they were just some of the pedestrians walking home like we were doing. In that twilight, who would have guessed that they were robber rapists just waiting for the traffic to slacken a little so they could pounce?”

The two women’s luck was really rotten that day, because the flow of traffic did die; and in no time the two robbers were upon the helpless and unsuspecting duo.

“He dragged me one way, and my friend was dragged the other way. The rains had not completely gone then, and the area where he dragged me was secluded by tall grass in a marshy and wet area. He had an iron grip on my throat, and I could feel a sharp object scrapping at my skin. I was experiencing difficulties breathing, and the fear was making it worse. 

“The man demanded to know if I had any money on me. I told him I did not; if I had money I would not have been walking home. So he demanded that I give up my phone. I had an android smart phone in the left front pocket of my jean skirt. But I told him I had no phone either. Sadly when you are on a roll for ill-luck, you are on a roll – it was just then that the phone started vibrating, and since the robber was pinning me to the ground by stifling my throat and straddling his legs over me, he felt the phone vibrating, and took it from me.”

That was not the end of her ordeal then; for the man yanked off her underwear and raped her once. You could see the pain in her eyes as, while recalling the events that followed her robbery, she looked away as if she did not want to remember what happened to her.

“He had one of those knives which can be opened and closed; so he opened and closed and opened it again, and placed in on the ground beside my head, and promised me that he was going to kill me if I dared scream.”

So she did not scream until he was through with her. When the police came, the man had already vanished in the green darkness. The Rothmans terrorists had attacked again, and got away with it. Again.

A few days later, they pounced again. This time they were three, and it was in the wee hours of the day when they accosted a security guard who was cycling his way to work and took his phone. Razalous Gatsva (46) made a detour to report the robbery to the police, but they knew they would get nothing when they got to the scene.

“Rather, it was Gatsva’s phone that triggered the chain of events that saw us finally winning the long turf war for the control of Rothmans area,” said Insp Chiripanyanga. “His phone had been installed with a mobile tracking application that would send SOS messages to Gatsva’s friends as soon as a new SIM card was mounted. No sooner had the phone been in use again than we got phone calls from Gatsva’s relatives saying they were receiving messages from a phone number that had been mounted onto his phone.”

In no time, the investigating officer, Sergeant Rester Ndlovu was on the phone. She used the land line from work, and spoke to a man who identified himself as Vengai Matafi.

“Matafi lives in Stoneridge, and he agreed to report to the station. On his arrival, he told us that he had just taken the phone from the house, and that the phone actually belonged to his older brother, Manners. We set a simple trap that had Manners travelling to Machipisa Shopping Centre where he hoped to meet his brother who had invited him there on the pretext that they had some business to discuss. He did meet his brother alright, but the police had tagged along.”

Manners admitted to have robbed the phone from Gatsva while in the company of his two accomplices, Clemence Chimutsa, and another who was only identified as Spinas. It did not matter about Spinas, because Spinas had met his Waterloo in Kadoma, when he was arrested on charges of fraud.

“Since Manners was our first real breakthrough to cracking the Rothmans conundrum, we threw the rape charges at him too. By now he must have felt really cornered, but he vehemently denied having raped anybody at that bridge. As it happened, Manners had a few aces up his sleeves. Having operated from the Rothmans area for some time, he knew exactly who had committed the rapes that he was trying his hardest to starve off his charge sheet. He gave us two names – Tapiwa Gwetsuro and Tendai Chari.”

He told the police that the two had made a home along somewhere along the very same river where they would drag people and rob them or rape them. A raid might alert them and they would slip from the police’s grasp – and the constabulary at Southerton simply could not lose the closest leads they had come across since Rothmans became an area of concern for them.

“We settled for another trap. Manners was to call his friends and inform them that there was a farmer who had made a killing at the auction floors and was leaving the premises in the company of his wife and son.”

Gwetsuro and Chari salivated at news of a windfall that had fallen right at their feet. But nobody told them that the ‘farmer’ was in reality the Member-in-Charge Crime at ZRP Southerton, Assistant Inspector Moses Mavezera and his ‘son’ was really Constable Needmore Mharadze. 

“I disguised myself as the wife,” Insp Chiripanyanga chuckled. “I drove home and borrowed my wife’s clothing – a woollen hat, a red top and a jean skirt to go along with them. Then I stuffed some socks into the brassiere that I had borrowed and I did pass for a woman when looked at from afar, or in the dark.  There was also space left to stuff a pistol. My family was armed too, and we had deployed another team of police officers to close off another street, in case the two smelled a rat and decided to run for it.”

It was getting dark and the police had to make haste. Manners had told his accomplices that the family was walking along Appleyard Road, and they had to get there soon. Insp Chiripanyanga and his company used a private vehicle to get to the road, and as fate would have it, they passed Gwetsuro and Chari as they rushed towards Speedy Shopping centre in search of their fortune. 

“We let them go, then made Manners to call them after a few minutes, to tell them that they were going in the wrong direction. They had actually passed by their potential prey as they rushed towards the shopping centre, so they had to return along Appleyard. Gwetsuro and Chari doubled back.”

By now Insp Chari, ‘her husband’ and ‘son’ had disembarked from their vehicle and were on foot in an area where the two robbers could see them. That part of the road in the industrial area was poorly lit, so the three ‘family members’ stepped up and until they reached the end of the street, which petered out near a beer hall.

“We laid our ambush by the corner of the street. I found a rock on which to sit while Asst Insp Mavezera and Cst Mharadze stayed on their feet. In no time, two men emerged from the street as if in a rush and as they emerged they kept looking in all directions as if they were looking for something. Or for someone. We did not know if, or how dangerously they were armed, so I gave the order that we surprise them first.”

They were surprised alright; in fact, so surprised were they that when the police produced pistols and ordered them down, they kept standing there in a state of complete obfuscation. It was only when the OIC squeezed his trigger and released a shot into the air that the two dropped like rocks to the ground.

“We asked them where they were going, and all they said was, Tanzi kune varimi vari kuno (We were informed that there were (loaded) farmers here).”

But the day was not over for the police yet. They took Gwetsuro and Chari to the cells and went about devising another way to catch Chimutse, who had been implicated in the Robbery that deprived Gatsva of his phone. It was time for Manners to work again. This time he sold his friend a ruse that his child had suddenly taken ill in Highfield, and that Chimutse had to be there that night. The latter took his time, and it was only when it was well past midnight that his taxi rolled to a stop at a service station just before Machipisa Shopping Centre. The man who caught him surprised him from behind, when Chimutse was thinking that he was going to meet his friend and get an update about his child’s state of health. He heard the chilling click of a pistol behind him and felt its cold barrel on his cheek – and he knew the game was up. Asked if he knew why he was being arrested, Chimutse replied that he knew about the robbery on the bridge.

Gatsva and the two women positively identified quartet for their various crimes, and they actually helped the police close some cold cases that had gone a long time without suspects.

“We were actually at the police station when the investigators cam in wearing their casual clothes, and one of them was wearing a woman’s clothes. When they told us they had caught the men who had robbed us, I could not believe it. But they took us to them and true enough, they were there in handcuffs, and sitting on the charge office floor. I recognised them at once.”

“The teamwork displayed by my members as we went about business on this case was amazing,” said the OIC.

The magistrate did not waste its time with Gwetsuro, who was jailed an effective 20 years after he was found guilty of both rape and robbery. His victim said he was happy that Gwetsuro would not be troubling another soul for at least fifteen years to come.

“What he did to me was as unforgivable as it was traumatic. They should lock him away for a long time. At least I can move on with the consolation that he was caught and would be paying for his sins.”