BULAWAYO – The investigation into the June 23, 2018, grenade attack targeting President Emmerson Mnangagwa and other VIPs during a Zanu PF rally at White City Stadium in Bulawayo has taken a dramatic new twist after Chinese investigators were brought in, ZimLive can reveal.
A team of detectives from the Criminal Investigations Department revisited the crime scene on November 27 in the company of four Chinese investigators.
There was a brief standoff with security guards from the City of Bulawayo who would not let them into the stadium as the detectives had no prior clearance from City Hall. The police team barged their way through, according to a council official briefed on the matter.
“The four Chinese guys spent time interviewing people who were present on the day of the explosion. They also dutifully made drawings and took notes. They were there for about two hours,” the source said.
National police spokesman Commissioner Paul Nyathi said he had no knowledge of Chinese investigators in the country.
ZimLive reported in June that Mnangagwa had ordered police to finalise the investigation into the grenade attack which came just six months into his presidency following a military coup that ousted longtime leader, Robert Mugabe.
The initial investigation appears to have gone nowhere, although police are reported to have developed a working theory that the grenade came from the military.
Evidence collected from the scene positively identified the explosive device as an offensive fragmentation grenade made in the former Soviet Union. That type of grenade is in active use by Zimbabwe’s military, according to sources.
Early reports soon after the bomb explosion had suggested that military investigators suspected that the grenade may have come from the ZRP’s armoury – but it was quickly established that the police disposed of their grenade stocks in the late 1980s.
The blast went off just meters from President Mnangagwa and other Zanu PF VIPs as they were leaving the stadium on June 23, killing two aides of vice presidents Constantino Chiwenga and Kembo Mohadi.
Mohadi suffered leg injuries in the explosion and was treated in South Africa along with several other survivors, among them defence minister Oppah Muchinguri.
Just days after the incident, Mnangagwa told he BBC on June 27 that his “hunch without evidence” was that loyalists of former President Mugabe and his wife, Grace, were behind the attack. He vowed that arrests would be made imminently.
Then, in August 2018 whilst addressing Zanu PF parliamentary candidates who had just won elections, Mnangagwa said: “We now have the knowledge on who did it. We want the current electoral processes to pass then we will deal with that matter.”
