ZAMBIAN security wings are up in arms against mobile phone service providers Airtel and MTN for refusing to grant them authority to trail fugitive bank robber Pamela Gondwe’s phone calls a few hours before she fled the country.
Immediately when the robbery was reported, the Police, Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC) contacted the two mobile phone providers to provide call trails and track the communication pattern for Pamela but they declined despite there being a search warrant.
The security wings immediately got hold of all the phone numbers that Pamela was using and they were MTN and Airtel. Urgent contacts were made to senior executives of Airtel and MTN including the managing directors but they did not cooperate.
Latest investigation have now revealed that Pamela only carried very little money with her when she boarded the Ethiopian Airline plane at Lusaka International Airport. But it is true that she walked away with a bag full of money from the bank.
“The money remained, she had no excess luggage. The mobile service providers frustrated all the efforts. They even stopped picking calls and some CEO even switched off his phone,” the source said.
With the provision of call records from Pamela’s phones it would have been easy to track the money and know who else was working with her.
The service providers only provided the demanded information on Pamela’s phone registers one week after she had fled. The security wings have since called for empowerment of police, DEC and ACC with adequate facilities to access key information from criminals without going through the bureaucracies of mobile Service Providers who seem to have no reverence for urgent security matters.
Meanwhile TANZANIA and other neighboring countries are unwilling to assist arrest Pamela Gondwe because of the previous failure by Zambia to eject many foreign criminals that are residing in Zambia and have linked with senior government officials.
A lot of desperate appeals have been made by Tanzanian security to Zambia before to assist them in arresting criminals who commit serious crimes in that country and run across the boarders for safety.
It has also been established that there is actually no serious search being conducted by Tanzanian authorities for Pamela who landed in that country two weeks ago after robbing her employer, Barclays Bank, of over $400,000.
There should be willingness from a country where a criminal has run to to assist in effecting the arrest as Interpol (international Police) subscriptions and adherence was not mandatory but voluntary.
So far Tanzania does not appear willing to pursue Pamela’s case despite them confirming that she landed in their country on the same day she stole the money and fled the country. It also explains why their CCTV video captured her arrival at the airport but strangely no arrest was made.