BY KUSEKWA KUSEKWA
The Court of Appeal has upheld the death sentence against six people for the 2013 Roman Catholic church bombing during a Mass for the Canonical Erection of the Burka Parish in Arusha’s Olasiti area that left three people dead and dozens injured.
The six, Abashari Omary, Yusuph Hutta, Ramadhani Waziri, Abdul Juma, Kassim Ramadhan and Japhari Lema were earlier convicted by the High Court for committing a terrorist act, murder and the use of property for the commission of a terrorist act and sentenced them to death by hanging. They were dissatisfied and appealed to the Court of Appeal, which has agreed with the conviction and sentence meted out to them by the High Court.
“The convictions and sentence imposed by the High Court for murder, the commission of terrorist acts and the use of property for the commission of terrorist acts are upheld in their entirety,” Justices Lugano Mwandambo, Abraham Mwampashi and Lameck Mlacha declared in their unanimous judgement delivered recently.
During the hearing of the appeal, the appellants had argued that their convictions were unsafe because they rested on contested confession statements lacking independent corroboration.
The prosecution, on the other hand, countered that the trial court had complied fully with the cautionary rules, finding independent corroboration in the appellants’ own defence testimonies and unbroken circumstantial chain matching the internal details of their confessions.
The Court of Appeal judgement noted that the trial court did not rely blindly on the contested statements in convicting the appellants, as it carefully found direct corroboration in their defence testimonies. According to the Justices, the appellants surprisingly corroborated key geographical movements and associations detailed in their cautionary statements.
The church bombing had shocked Arusha and Tanzania generally, which has a long history of peaceful co-existence and religious tolerance.
