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Leonard Ncube Victoria Falls Reporter
THREE brothers, one of them HIV positive and their cousin raped their niece several times on separate occasions in an ordeal that lasted for five months. Two of the brothers were each sentenced to 12 years in jail on Monday for the rape following separate trials while the other one is on the run for the assaults that occurred between December last year and April this year.

Their cousin, 15, was sentenced to receive four strokes with a rattan cane after he was also found guilty of raping the girl. The boy’s two year jail sentence was wholly suspended for five years on condition that he does not commit a similar offence.

At the time the girl was raped, she was living with her maternal grandparents in Lupane where she was doing Grade Six at a local school.

Her mother, who stays in Cowdray Park in Bulawayo, discovered the abuse when she noticed some white discharge on the victim’s private parts in April when schools closed.

The girl’s 20 year-old uncle, according to his victim, was the first to rape her in December.

He would follow her to the river where she would have gone to fetch water and rape her in a bush in Tshebetshebe area of Lupane.

He pleaded not guilty and claimed the girl was too young to match his manhood which would have “ravaged her.”

“Your worship, she is lying. As young as she is if I had done this to her she wouldn’t have been able to walk as I’ve a big p…s,” said the uncle.

Hwange magistrate Dambudzo Malunga sentenced him to 12 years in jail on Monday.

His elder brother, 42, who also pleaded guilty and revealed in court that he was HIV positive was also sentenced to 12 years on the same day after the magistrate convicted him.

He raped the girl several times in February this year after he discovered that she had “slept” with his younger brother.

In apparent blackmail, he threatened to tell her grandmother that she slept with his brothers if she refused to sleep with him too.

Prosecuting, Tawanda Sigauke told the court that her 42-year-old uncle would rape the girl each time she took food to his bedroom hut where he was bedridden. He said the man would give the girl R2 to buy her silence.

“The accused closed the door and ordered the complainant to lie on the bed and raped her. After the incident, the accused would call her into the hut and force her into sex and give her a R2 coin,” said Sigauke.

The girl’s other uncle, whose age was not given, fled when the crime came in the open.

The court also heard that the 15-year-old boy invited his cousin who was playing with other children to a bedroom hut and raped her once.

He raped her again when elders had gone to a funeral in a neighbouring village, when he sneaked into her blankets at night as they shared the same bedroom hut.

The matter was reported to the police in May 2015.