HARARE – High Court judge Chinembiri Bhunu will on Thursday make a ruling on whether gun dealer Peter Michael Hitschmann – a key state witness in a treason trial of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s top aide Roy Bennett – will be impeached for becoming a “hostile” witness.

If Bhunu allows the state to impeach Hitschmann, this would pave way for the prosecution to cross-examine the arms dealer on the key statement incriminating Bennett that the gun dealer had sought to render irrelevant by disowning it in court.

“The state has made a case of impeachment so that the truth and justice can be found,” said Attorney General Johannes Tomana as he finished his application to have Hitschmann, who has turned into a problematic witness for the state, impeached.  

Hitschmann maintained that he was not being hostile, arguing that the state was not being sincere in its case because he had notified it through an affidavit last November that he did not want to testify against Bennett, a senior official of Tsvangirai’s MDC party.

“In fact what Mr Tomana, has done is to deceive this honourable court and has wasted valuable time and resources and caused additional and unnecessary stress to me,” said Hitschmann, a former police officer dismissing the state application to impeach him as “obscure, to say the very lease, for it makes no sense to me”.

“He knew from the onset that I had nothing to contribute as far as the state case against the accused (Bennett) is concerned.”

Prosecutors allege Hitschmann was paid by Bennett to buy weapons to assassinate President Robert Mugabe. They say Hitschmann implicated Bennett in 2006 when he was arrested after being found in possession of firearms.

“I would have been delighted if the fire arms had been in possession of the accused, but regrettably, they were in my possession, and he (Bennett) had nothing to do with them being in my possession,” said Hitschmann.

Bennett faces a possible death sentence if found guilty in a case that has heightened tensions in Zimbabwe’s fragile coalition government.

The MDC says the case against him is politically motivated and aimed at keeping him out of the unity government it formed with Mugabe's ZANU PF party last February

By Zimonline