KEY POINTS:
Perence Shiri is a name that will permanently be connected to the worst crimes against humanity in Zimbabwe.
While much of the world was still feting Robert Mugabe and the new independence government in 1982, Colonel Shiri, as he then was, was leading a battalion of North Korean-trained soldiers in a massacre of political opponents in Matabeleland.
Researchers believe as many as 20,000 were murdered and dumped in unmarked graves. That atrocity cemented Colonel Shiri's place in the Mugabe regime and catapulted him up the military ranks. Ever since, he has been at the fore during each of the worst periods of oppression.
He was promoted to the rank of air marshal and rewarded with a selection of farms seized from white owners.
Marshal Shiri is also a leading member of the Joint Operations Command, the inner cell of Mugabe cronies who planned the terror campaign unleashed on the population after the March election defeat for the ruling party. He is among the handful in Zimbabwe with the most to fear from any future war crimes investigations.
- INDEPENDENT
