A plane
has left Zimbabwe for
Singapore carrying government officials and relatives to bring home the body
of Robert Mugabe,
but it was still not clear where the former leader would be buried, a family
spokesman said on Monday.
Zimbabwe's charge d'affaires Claudius Nhema and other visitors leave
after attending a private religious service at Singapore casket. The funeral
parlour where the body of the late Robert Mugabe is being held in Singapore.
Leo
Mugabe, the late president’s nephew and family spokesman, said a charter plane
left Harare for Singapore just after 9 am (0700 GMT) on Monday.Mugabe’s family is pushing back against the government’s plan to bury him at the National Heroes Acre monument in Harare and wants him to be interred in his home village, relatives have told Reuters.
Mugabe’s body was
expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on Wednesday at 3 pm (1300 GMT), Leo Mugabe told
Reuters.
But when
pressed on where Mugabe would be buried, Leo Mugabe was non-committal.
“Mugabe
was a chief and he will be buried in accordance with tradition. The chiefs have
not told us where he will be buried, so it is not clear yet. I also don’t
know,” he said.
In some
parts of Zimbabwe, burials of chiefs are a secret affair and people are only
told the resting place afterwards.
Mugabe
died on Friday aged 95 in Singapore, where he had long received medical
treatment. He had dominated Zimbabwean politics for almost four decades from
independence in 1980 until he was removed by his own army in a November 2017
coup.
Revered
by many as a liberator who freed his people from white minority rule, Mugabe
was vilified by others for wrecking one of Africa’s most promising economies
and ruthlessly crushing his opponents.
Mugabe’s
resting place has been a topic of discussion since the Zimbabwe Independent
newspaper reported last month that Mugabe would snub the offer of a burial at
National Heroes Acre – a site reserved for the country’s heroes – because he felt
bitter about the way he was removed from power.
The
Zimbabwean government said in a memo sent to embassies that it planned to hold
a state funeral for Mugabe in the National Sports Stadium on Saturday, with a
burial ceremony on Sunday, but it did not say where the burial would be.
If Mugabe
is buried in Kutama village, 85 km from Harare, it would be a major rebuke for
his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the ruling ZANU-PF party that
Mugabe helped to found.
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