HARARE: A legislator from Zimbabwe’s ruling party appeared in court Monday for uttering “insulting remarks” about President Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace during a verbal exchange with a fellow ZANU-PF party member.
Member of parliament Justice Wadyajena, 35, was charged with “criminal insult or, alternatively, conduct likely to provoke the breach of peace” when he appeared before magistrate Lindiwe Maphosa in the resort town of Victoria Falls.
Prosecutor Listen Nare told the court that the lawmaker “used abusive or insulting language” against a party member who had a portrait of Grace Mugabe and a slogan calling on party members to rally behind her, emblazoned on his car.
The MP and party member Jimayi Muduvuri were both attending the ZANU-PF annual conference on Victoria Falls.
Wadyajena was quoted in court papers as having told Muduvuri: “You are a fool as well as that mother of yours.”
The first lady is referred to as “mother” by the ruling party supporters.
Wadyajena has been linked to a faction of ZANU-PF loyal to Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa who is seen as Mugabe’s heir while Muduvuri, a businessman, is seen as belonging to a group in the party opposed to Mnangagwa’s bid to succeed Africa’s oldest leader.
Mugabe, 91, has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980 and has avoided naming a successor.
His party has been riven by infighting between factions jostling to succeed him.
MP Wadyajena was granted $800 bail and is expected to go on trial in Jan. 5.
MP on trial for insulting Mugabe’s wife
MP on trial for insulting Mugabe’s wife
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
