A man was axed to death by his wife after coronavirus lockdown tensions boiled over during a row over the control of a television remote, police said.
Police have charged Ordetta Mpofu, 44, with the murder of 52-year-old Thembani Mpofu following the Friday night incident in Bulawayo’s Emganwini suburb.
The Mpofu family was huddled around a TV at about 7.45PM when Mpofu’s teenage daughter allegedly changed channels, infuriating her mother.
“That did not go down well with her mother, who asked her to switch back to the previous channel,” Inspector Abednico Ncube of Bulawayo police said. “A misunderstanding arose between the daughter and her mother. The mother became angry and the father didn’t intervene and indicated that he was not interested in their conflict and retired to bed.”
Police say Mpofu was still seething when she finally joined her husband in the bedroom at about 9.30PM, angry that he had not admonished his daughter.
“She armed herself with an axe, got into their bedroom and axed her husband three times on the head while he was asleep. He died instantly,” Ncube said, according to The Sunday News.
Police say after the killing, she walked out of her bedroom and told her daughter she had just killed her husband.
“The daughter got into the bedroom and discovered that her father was bleeding profusely. She screamed, startling her brother who also walked in on the scene,” Ncube said.
Ncube said police were urging Zimbabweans “to be patient with each other in their respective families.”
The slain man worked in the Bulawayo City Council’s engineering department, colleagues said.
Measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus, including national lockdowns, have heightened tensions within families. A spike in divorce filing has been recorded in China following a prolonged lockdown.
The Tongzhou District Civil Affairs Bureau in Sichuan province said it received 232 divorce requests between late February and end-March. That compared with fewer than 180 in the same period a year earlier.
Civil affairs bureau officials in Yunnan, Shaanxi and Ningxia provinces said about two-thirds of divorce filings in recent weeks cited the stresses of dealing with the virus or the quarantine measures.
In South Africa, in the first week of a 21-daylockdown, from March 27 to 31, police received 2,300 complaints in relation to gender-based violence.
