Zimra employee in court for pornographic material

By Thupeyo Muleya

Beitbridge 8 March 2011

A Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) employee based at Beitbridge border post has been dragged to court for allegedly loading pornographic material into her employer’s computer before sending it to her friends using the organisation’s email facility.

Susan Phiri (32) of Flat Number 204, Limpopo View in the border town and employed as a communications technology specialist at the border post was not asked to plead to contravening a section of the Censorship and Entertainment Control Act when she appeared before Beitbridge magistrate, Mrs Auxilia Chiumburu yesterday.

She was further remanded out of custody to 18 March for trial as key State witnesses from Harare failed to show up.

The state led by, Mr. Jabulani Mberesi alleges that sometime on 6 June last year, Phiri used her password to access the Zimra email were she then went to her files and selected the one with the name: “Some stretches to help you loosen up” and forwarded it to Robert Maganga, Vimbai Marare, Precious Musoni and Misheck Chaturuka.

He said the document contained DVD recordings and still photos of pornographic material showing couples having anal sex.

The case came to light sometime in October last year, when it was discovered that the Zimra computer network system was operating at a slow pace owing to an overload resulting in delays in the processing of customs formalities.

Thus this prompted some senior mangers to investigate the root of the overloading.

A special team from the organisation’s information and technology department started monitoring the computer system using software called Riverbed appliance, which is a computer traffic monitoring and acceleration utility leading to the discovery of the pornographic material.

The file was also viewed by the Board of Censors under reference BC4/56, which in turn confirmed that the file captured on DVD and still photo mode was obscene.

A report was made to the police leading to the arrest of Phiri’s subsequent arrest.

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