WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2004-01-12 Posted By: Jan
From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 1/12/2004 7:48:43 AM
Zim: Journalists charged for Mugabe plane report
[Note. Mugabe and his henchmen are very sensitive to reports which portray them in a bad light. I am sure this report is valid. There have been reports for years in Rhodesian magazines that Mugabe grabs commercial airlines for personal flights whenever he wants. He just takes an Air Zimbabwe airliner when it suits him and the passengers are then stranded. Now, suddenly, he doesn’t like this sort of report getting out – so he’s attacking the journalists. Jan]
Harare – Zimbabwean police charged three journalists with criminal defamation on Sunday over a report that President Robert Mugabe had commandeered a passenger plane from the national airline for personal travel, their lawyer said.
Linda Cook said police had told her that Iden Wetherell, editor of the private weekly Zimbabwe Independent, news editor Vincent Kahiya and senior reporter Dumisani Muleya would spend a second night in jail before going to court on Monday.
Police arrested the men on Saturday after the paper reported in a front-page article the day before that Mugabe, who is on annual leave, had ordered an Air Zimbabwe plane from the capital Harare to take him from Malaysia to Indonesia. It said passengers had been left stranded.
“The three have been charged with criminal defamation. We deny the charges and we believe that they are spurious… The story is true and these are matters of legitimate public scrutiny involving the most senior person in the country,” Cook told Reuters on Sunday.
‘The story is true’
In remarks carried by state media on Saturday, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo called the newspaper’s report “absurd and criminally false” and said it would be held accountable.
The Zimbabwe Independent, like most other privately owned newspapers, has been critical of Mugabe’s government as the country grapples with a political and economic crisis widely blamed on government mismanagement.
The government accuses private media houses of driving a Western-led propaganda campaign against it, in retaliation for its seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution among landless blacks.
More than a dozen journalists have been arrested and charged under legislation introduced soon after Mugabe’s controversial re-election in 2002 that tightened controls on the media and set tougher penalties for the publication of false reports.
Source: IOL
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=68&ar…br>