The Machinga Magistrate Court on Friday sentenced 47-year-old Mussa Kachepa to 10 years in imprisonment with hard labour for being found in possession of human bones, contrary to Section 16 of the Anatomy Act.<\/p>\n
During the hearing, Kachepa admitted that he wanted to sell the albino bones to a certain woman from Liwonde who had asked him to look for the bones.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor, Machno Lungu, asked the court to impose a stiffer punishment to the defendant as a way of giving a lesson to others, as such offences are rampant in the district.<\/p>\n
When passing judgment, Chief Resident Magistrate, Agness Patemba told the court that people are living in fear with killings of people with albinism and concurred with the prosecutor that the offence was a serious one.<\/p>\n
Kachepa\u2019s plea for leniency from the court that he is a family man with two pregnant wives and 10 children was thrown out.<\/p>\n
Reacting to the sentence, law professor, Edge Kanyongolo, said the sentence is stiff enough as there was no evidence that the accused killed an albino.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is a sentence that continues to send a message that the attacks on a section of the population requires a strong legal response. Being found with human bones is not proof beyond reasonable doubt that someone killed the person. If there was that proof, he could have been charged with murder,\u201d said Kanyongolo.<\/p>\n
Kachepa was arrested on June 10 together with another man, Muhammed James, after one of Kachepa\u2019s wives tipped police that he was keeping nine human bones. The two told police that they were told by a woman identified as Mary Gundo to find the bones.<\/p>\n
Gundo and James are to appear before the court this week for sentencing.<\/p>\n
Since the attacks on people with albinism started in 2014, Machinga has recorded the highest cases of abductions, killings and exhumation of bones of people with albinism from graves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Machinga Magistrate Court on Friday sentenced 47-year-old Mussa Kachepa to 10 years in imprisonment with hard labour for being found in possession of human bones, contrary to Section 16 of the Anatomy Act. During the hearing, Kachepa admitted that he wanted to sell the albino bones to a certain woman from Liwonde who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26945,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26947,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943\/revisions\/26947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}