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(Lusaka, 21 APRIL 2023)— THE chief of security at the prestigious Sarova Hotel in Lusaka has revealed that the hotel has 120 CCTV cameras which they use to record videos of guests and surrender footage to third parties if requested.
Antony Mtonga, 48, testified before Lusaka Principal Resident Magistrate Irene Wishimanga that the cameras cover the entire premises of the five star boutique hotel starting from the basement into the lifts, spa, bar, reception, hallways, restaurants and upto the upper rooms.
This is in the matter in which the DEC is alleging that Amos Chanda destroyed a court record.
The state witness said he had cut the video footage and put it on a flash disc which he surrendered to DEC officers led by arresting officer Boyd Munalula. He did this on 27 October 2022, a day after the accused person had appeared in court regarding this matter.
“Three DEC officers led by Mr Boyd Munalula ordered me to extract footage and give it to them. The general manager of the hotel instructed me to give DEC whatever they would request and so I went to the CCTV room and we started viewing footage of everything that happened between 20 hours and 23:30 hours on September 30, 2022,” Mtonga narrated, emphasising that he has this kind of job for four years now.
“I have been doing this for four years and I am properly trained by Sarova hotel which sent me to India and to Central Africa University,” he said.
Mtonga said he witched on all cameras from the basement up to second floor of the hotel and narrowed his search on a person he and DEC identified as Amos Chanda who arrived in a black car and went to lift upto the poolside on the second floor where he a private meeting with friends.
The state prosecutor then applied that the court moves to Sarova to view the footage that Mtonga referred to in his testimony.
But the court ruled that it was unnecessary to move to Sarova because whatever was recorded on system has been auto-deleted after 60 days as per the testimony of the witness.
This was in response to the defence objection to move the court to SAROVA hotel to view footage which was in fact in the possession of the DEC on the flash disc.
“The application is unnecessary and sheer waste of time and a clear sign that the State is not ready for this matter,” submitted defence counsel Benjamin Mwelwa.
Another defence lawyer Timmy Munalula said the barbaric manner in which DEC forced Sarova to testify against Amos Chanda does need any scientific proof to understand what was going on, prompting the court to guide the lawyer to use another word. The lawyer substituted it for “forceful pressure.”
“Your Worship what we are being asked is as good as being asked to revive a dead person,” said Munalula. ” We are being invited to view deleted footage. They have been caught with a tragedy of having broken the chain of custody of the evidence.”
“I want to use a polite idiom but all I cam say is that the State has been caught with their wet hands in pocket and of they try to remove them, they cannot avoid the liquid being clearly noticed by all.”
But the court guided that at this stage it was the State’s case and it was upto them how they wanted to prosecute it but when it comes to production of what may be seen on the footage it will be their burden.
“Counsel Munalula let them show you the funeral house and perhaps you can then wait for burial. There are only two situations here. It is their case now and let them proceed they way they deem fit” Magistrate Wishimanga ruled.
“But I have taken judicial notice of sentiments from both sides and hereby rule that we shall only move to Sarova hotel to see the facility from where the footage was extracted and not to view the footage because that footage is not there anymore.”
“The footage on the flash will be viewed from this courtroom. That is why these digital facilities were installed in this courtroom,” she said.
Another defence lawyer Agrippa Malando said there was no need to view the footage from Sarova when the court had sufficient capacity to play the footage within the court premises.
He said whatever the prosecution wanted the court to see was in the safe custody of the DEC somewhere and we have no issue seeing that footage but we object to wastage of court’s time.
At the opening of the trial on 22 February 2023 DEC senior investigations officer, Jones Siasamba, told the court that he did not investigate anything about the purported missing court record because he was only concerned with the alleged recording he purportedly made on Amos Chanda in a noisy bar at Sarova Hotel .
Siasamba claimed that he had a recording of Mr Chanda but did not have any scientific voice analysis report to affirm that the alleged audio was that of Mr Chanda. He claimed he made the recording between 20 and 22 hours in the night.
But on 19 April 2023, an expert state witness from ZICTA told the same court that his analysis of the recoding device that DEC submitted to him for processing showed that the purported recording was done at 02:55 am in the early hours of September 30,2022, long before Mr Chanda arrived at the hotel around 21 hours in the night.
Jeff Sitali, 38, the manager for cyber security and specialist consumer education at ZICTA told the court that he carried out digital forensics and established that the device given to him by the DEC contained recordings done on 30 September 2022 at 02:55 am in the morning and not at 22:00 hrs as stated by Siansamba.
Sitali said the court must believe him because his report was an expert analysis pooled and drawn using incorruptible operating systems which cannot allow any external insertions into the devices used to decoded and encode data.
The witness also admitted that the report he submitted before court was not conclusive because he sent it back to the DEC for review.
On the same day, another state witness, James Habasimbi, a waiter at Sarova Hotel, told the court he was just waiter whose job was to serve clients but he was instructed by two “outsiders” to implicate Amos Chanda.
He said two people who don’t work for Sarova hotel summoned him to the CCTV room and asked him to mention Amos Chanda as one of the people who sat on a dinner table of interest to them.
James Habasimbi,33, a waiter at Sarova Hotel said: “me l am just a waiter and I know nothing about this case before court. All I know is that Mr Amos Chanda is a public figure and he comes to the hotel.
Ends…
Source: Smart Eagles
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