CIO masterminding poaching in Zimbabwe

On 24 November, two police sergeants – Robert Shumba and Vengai Mazhara – headed to a homestead near Chipinge Safari Area in Zimbabwe’s eastern Highlands after being tipped off that a poacher armed with an AK-47 had been spotted in the area.

They died in a hail of bullets. Chaita Simango, the homestead owner who it was claimed helped hide the poacher, was also killed, while the poacher escaped.

A month later, the police arrested the man alleged to have supplied the AK-47 used in the killings. Apprehended at a flat in Bulawayo, the 36-year-old man was Munashe Mugwira, an operative for country’s much-feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).

This was not Mugwira’s first brush with the law. In 2010, he was shot and wounded by police during a high-speed chase through the streets of Bulawayo. He had attempted to evade arrest on charges of fraud, kidnapping, extortion and robbery stemming from a bizarre plot to con a Pakistani businessman into buying “red mercury” – a hoax substance peddled by conmen as the “ultimate weapon” and an ingredient for a “dirty bomb”.

Mugwira went to court, yet kept his position at the CIO – evidence, some say, of his “untouchability” due his links with the state.

After that experience, it seems Mugwira moved into illegal poaching. On 13 December 2015, a suspected poacher was arrested after a shoot-out in the Savé Valley Conservancy in the south of the country. In his statement, the suspect John Chisango told police that Mugwira had supplied him and four others with AK-47s and .303 hunting rifles to “kill rhinos”. The serial numbers had been filed off the weapons.

Chisango also implicated Mugwira in the poisoning of elephants. Cyanide, which is widely used in Zimbabwe’s mining industry, is relatively easy to obtain due to lax controls and it has been used repeatedly by poachers.

In 2013, for instance, at least 300 elephants died after waterholes and salt-licks were poisoned with cyanide in what was described as “the largest massacre of elephant in this part of the world for the last 25 years”. And in October 2015, at least 62 elephants were reported to have been poisoned with oranges laced with cyanide in Kariba and Hwange National Park.

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