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| Maesaiah Thabane |
MASERU, Lesotho
The wife of Lesotho’s prime minister, who is
charged with murdering her predecessor, will stand trial on March 17, a
magistrate ruled on Tuesday when she appeared in court.
Maesaiah
Thabane was detained this month accused of ordering the killing of Prime
Minister Thomas Thabane’s estranged wife Lipolelo.
Lipolelo
Thabane was shot dead in June 2017 near her home in Maseru, the capital of the
tiny independent kingdom, which lies in the middle of a South African mountain
range.
Police
allege Maesaiah Thabane hired eight assassins to kill her but was not present
at the shooting.
Maesaiah
Thabane, who has denied any involvement in the killing but cannot enter a plea
until her trial starts, appeared briefly in court before being driven to
Lesotho’s plush state house, where a few dozen supporters wearing the red,
yellow and green of her husband’s ABC party greeted her.
Wearing
a zebra-print dress with gold trim, a gold-colored neckerchief and a black felt
boater hat, she chuckled as they sang: “jealousy is of the soul of the hater,”
in the local Soto language, voicing their belief that she is the victim of a
plot by political rivals.
Lipolelo,
then 58, and Thomas Thabane, now 80, had been going through an acrimonious
divorce when she was killed, two days before her husband’s inauguration as
prime minister. Thabane and Maesaiah Thabane, now 42, married two months later. - Reuters
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