AMOS CHANDA DIDN’T COMMIT ANY CRIME AT SAROVAR HOTEL SAYS STATE WITNESS
(Lusaka, 24 APRIL 2023)— A State witness has told the Lusaka Magistrates Court that Amos Chanda did not commit any crime at Sarovar Hotel on 30 September 2022 as alleged by the DEC.
This is a matter in which DEC prosecutors today moved the Lusaka Magistrates Court to Lusaka’s Sarovar Hotel just for site-seeing of the network of the 120 cameras in the hotel’s control room, poolside and basement carpark.
During cross-examination by defence lawyer Timmy Munalula, during the inspection of the basement carpark where the witness said Amos Chanda parked the car on September 30 last year, Sarovar hotel chief security officer Antony Mtonga (44) told the court that Mr Chanda did not commit any offence at the hotel that day or any other times he has visited the hotel.
Defence lawyers also asked Principal Resident Magistrate Irene Wishimanga to take judicial notice of the arrangement of the tables at poolside where no two tables were connected to each other as stated by DEC senior investigations officer Jones Siansamba.
Lawyers also asked Mtonga to show the court which of the three cameras that were focused on Mr Chanda would show where he sat, but the witness said all the three cameras did not show his full body but only showed a poor image of an unidentifiable person chest downwards.
“No I can’t tell where he sat. I don’t even know which table is number 22 and which one is 24. That is for the waiters to say,” he said.
” You can see him in the camera in the passage but as he got to the poolside terrace, it was dark and the cameras had been adjusted so that they don’t overshoot into Mandal Hill (shopping complex.) As a result all the people on the deck were cut chest downwards and the images were poor,” he said.
When the court court descended to the basement, the chief security officer identified two cameras that the hotel used to zoom on Amos Chanda as he parked.
Asked to state whether in that footage he saw the accused destroying any court document, the witness said Mr Chanda never committed any offence there or indeed anywhere else in the hotel.
In CCTV room, Mtonga said the footage that existed on server was secure and incorruptible before it was deleted 60 days after it was created. But he admitted that the footage he gave DEC was raw and not secured with any password.
The court did not view any footage there because the material DEC wanted the court to see was auto-deleted on 30 December, 2022, the hotel’s chief of security explained.
The court had ruled on Friday, April 21, 2023 that its visit to the hotel was only to view the physical infrastructure and not the footage or any software.
This followed the prosecution’s insistence last that it is important for the court to look at the CCTV hardware although the software, configured into a 60-day auto delete mode, erased the footage DEC claims contained vital evidence.
After looking at the hotel CCTV infrastructure, the Magistrate has ruled that the witness on the stand be cross examined on June 12, the date to which she has adjourned the matter.
Last Friday Mtonga revealed that the hotel has installed 120 CCTV cameras which they use to record videos of guests and surrender footage to third parties if requested.
He said the cameras cover the entire premises of the five-star boutique hotel starting from the basement carparks into the lifts, spa, bar, reception, hallways, restaurants and upto the upper rooms.
Mtonga said three DEC officers led by arresting officer Boyd Munalula ordered him to extract footage and give it to them and that the hotel general manager instructed him to handover any footage from any of the hotel’s rooms of interest to the DEC.
At the opening of the trial on 22 February 2023, DEC senior investigations officer, Jones Siansamba, 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 .
But Siasamba admitted that he did not have any technical voice analysis report to affirm with certainty that the alleged audio was indeed 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 the 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 02:55:17 am, in the morning and not at 22:00 hrs as stated by Siansamba. He also said he infact did not listen to the audio and so he can’t say the person in the recording was Amos Chanda.
He said he focused on digital forensics to ascertain the integrity of the recording device and not the audios contained therein because he did not have any voice analysis expertise.
Sitali said the court must believe him because his report was an expert analysis pooled and drawn using “incorruptible” operating systems which cannot permit any external insertions into the devices he uses to decode and encode data. He also said he cannot tell the actual source of the recording.
On the same day, another state witness, James Habasimbi, 33, told the court he was just waiter whose job was to serve clients but 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 identify and mention Amos Chanda as one of the people who sat on a dinner table (24) of interest to them. But Habasimbi presented to court a bill for table 22 where Amos Chanda did not sit that night.
“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.”