PEOPLE in the gallery wept when an 8-year-old girl took to the stand to narrate how her father’s brutal butchering of her mother as she watched shattered her family.

She told Bulawayo High Court Judge Justice Maxwell Takuva, who was on circuit in Hwange in 2017 that she watched her father, Pathukuthula Moyo callously axing her mother repeatedly over infidelity accusations.

She appeared to shudder each time she mentioned the blood that gushed out of her mother’s wounds as her father frenziedly struck her.

“I heard my mother screaming and when I rushed to check she was lying on her stomach in a pool of blood as he struck her. He then stood next to the body holding a blood stained axe. After that he dragged the body into the kitchen and left it,” narrated the emotional minor while trying to get composure.

She appeared traumatised. Moyo believed his wife was seeing another man, and this filled him with deep jealousy. He came up with a plan. The “plan” involved an axe. The murder was premeditated; he had brought the axe to the house with him earlier that morning.State media