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Herald Reporter

TWO men who admitted to robbing a woman of her cellphone and threatened to rape and kill her, have been jailed for an effective one-year each. 

 Marvelous Majoni (20) and Washington Magwambo (24) of Gumiremhete village under Chief Chireya in Gokwe, were on Friday last week convicted on their own plea of guilty to robbery when they appeared before Gokwe provincial magistrate Mr Musaiwona Shotgame.

 Mr Shotgame sentenced the pair to 18 months in jail each, of which six months were conditionally suspended for five years.

 In assessing appropriate sentence, Mr Shotgame took the view that courts should not trivialise violence against women, finding that the duo’s moral blameworthiness was high in this case. 

He said imprisonment would meet the justice of the offence.

 Prosecutor Ms Getrude Shoko had called for a severe and deterrent sentence to send a strong warning to agents of violence against women in society. 

Ms Shoko told the court that on August 31 around 4pm, the complainant Ms Linnet Mavhurere was at Mashambadzi village where she had gone to collect her lunch box when she was accosted by Majoni and Magwambo, demanding her to surrender her cellphone, but she refused.

Magwambo forcibly took Ms Mavhurere’s earphones while proposing love to her, but was spurned. Majoni then grabbed her Itel A 14 Max cellphone and threw it to Magwambo.

Ms Mavhurere wrestled with the two men in an attempt to get back her phone, but the two threatened to rape and kill her. 

They told her that they could only give back the cellphone if she agreed to be intimate with  them. 

But Ms Mavhurere refused. 

The two men later fled from the scene upon seeing another villager who came to the rescue of Mavhurere.

 On arrival home, Ms Mavhurere narrated her ordeal to her parents and the following day, the Mavhurere family launched a manhunt of their daughter’s assailants. They located the men, with the help of the community, at their homestead.

Ms Shoko said as the two men saw the victim and her parents approaching their homestead, they took to their heels, but were arrested by a police constabulary only identified as Mutero at Madhondo Business Centre.