PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s former bodyguard, Cain Chademana, was probably killed by AIDS, according to a death certificate obtained by New Zimbabwe.com.
This website has received unprecedented cooperation from Zimbabwean authorities who released the document, on request, along with an accompanying letter from a hospital where he was treated, as they fight UK and South African newspaper claims that he was killed through poisoning to stop him revealing information about First Lady Grace Mugabe’s alleged affair with Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono.
Chademana, who died on August 26, suffered cardiorespiratory arrest, disseminated tuberculosis, pneumonia and “retroviral infection” -- a medical euphemism for HIV, according to a death certificate dated August 28, and signed by Milcah Mapfumo for the Registrar General.
Chademana, who was 38, was already a widower after his wife succumbed last year, it has also been claimed, to AIDS.
New Zimbabwe.com has also obtained a statement from West End Hospital in Harare where Chademana was admitted on August 16.
During the 10 days he was admitted there, the hospital’s general manager Dr Margaret Maulana, confirms that Chademana “was treated for gastroenteritis, meningitis and anaemia”.
The release of details of Chademana’s medical history comes as President Robert Mugabe is said to be mulling taking an unprecedented step of suing the South African and British Sunday Times newspapers which claimed the bodyguard, a former security detail to the late Edison Zvobgo, was “poisoned under Mugabe's instructions by Mugabe's intelligence men, allegedly employing an undetectable poison.”
Chademana, the newspapers alleged, had overheard President Robert Mugabe’s dying sister, Sabina, tell his brother that his wife was cheating on him with the married Gono. The Sunday Times claimed the incident happened “between 6pm and 7pm on July 26 in the intensive care ward at the Avenues Clinic in Harare.”
“As he [Mugabe] sat on her bed with senior police commissioner Cain Chademana, his most trusted bodyguard, at his side, she told him the truth,” reporter Jon Swain wrote.
But senior aides to Mugabe and Gono have already dismissed the report as a “mendacious hatchet job”. On the day the President is said to have met Sabina, who died on July 29, he was in Uganda attending an African Union summit and Chademana had long since been withdrawn from his service owing to poor health.
Both Gono, 51, and Grace Mugabe, 45, strongly refute Sunday Times allegations that they had an affair going back five years during which they met in love nests in Malaysia, South Africa and her dairy farm.
Sources close to the pair say they have consulted lawyers as they plan to fight the allegations, although some of their political advisers are advising against the move.
