Malawi-born Evangelists Shepherd and Mary Bushiri’s extradition hearings were on Monday postponed to 15 March in Lilongwe, Malawi, due to the defence’s complaints against the presiding magistrate’s status as a credible court manager, APA has learnt.
According to Lawyer Wapona Kita, the Bushiris were not happy with the presiding Lilongwe Magistrate Court’s Patrick Chirwa for his role in issuing arrest warrants for them earlier when the couple were sending their seriously ailing daughter to Nairobi, Kenya for medical attention.
The Malawian authorities, when they got wind of the eight-year-old daughter’s travel plans, went to the airport to stop her from travelling and at the same time rushed to Chirwa’s court to secure arrest warrants for her parents, thinking they were about to escape from the country.
Kita had to rush and intervene with a court injunction in both instances to stop 30 policemen who had surrounded the Bushiri’s home, whose owner was in fact working at his TV studio in the capital Lilongwe.
That was when Bushiri heard that his daughter had failed to leave the country for Kenya after forcibly being returned to her private clinic from the airport with a drip still on her arm.
During Monday’s hearings, Kita advanced that the hearing should not continue until Chirwa recused himself from the hearing following his “misguided” arrest warrants to lock up the Bushiris on assumption they were about to flee the country.
The Bushiris are fugitives from South African justice where they are accused, among other charges, of corruption and money laundering.
The couple said they left their Pretoria base because the three white police officers who filed the charges against them were alleged extortionists who demanded millions in “protection” money from them to drop the charges.
When the Bushiris refused to pay the alleged bribe, they charged, the cops filed new charges against the evangelists to add on top of similar 2017 charges – and this time were refused bail for 11 days.
Once granted bail, the preachers said they knew they could not get a fair trial in South Africa.
This was the reason that drove them to leave for Malawi to seek justice, they said.
Meanwhile, the ailing daughter finally travelled to Kenya days later after Kita took the Malawi government to court to force the Malawi police to lift her travel ban.
NM/as/APA