A Johannesburg court has handed down a ruling ordering the immediate deportation of Bellarmine Mugabe, the 28-year-old youngest son of Zimbabwe’s late former long-ruling president Robert Mugabe, following his guilty pleas on weapons and unlawful immigration charges.
The court also handed down an additional penalty requiring Mugabe to pay a $36,000 (equivalent to roughly £26,700) fine for his convictions. His co-accused, Tobias Matonhodze, received a far harsher sentence: three years of imprisonment after pleading guilty to a slate of charges including attempted murder, unlawful possession of ammunition, defeating the ends of justice, and illegal entry into South Africa.
The arrests of both men date back to February 19, when local law enforcement responded to a disturbance call at Mugabe’s private residence in Hyde Park, an upscale, exclusive suburb of Johannesburg. During the incident, a 23-year-old security guard was shot and rushed to a local hospital in critical condition. Prosecutors told the court that the violence erupted after a verbal altercation between the three men on the property. As the victim attempted to escape the confrontation by running outside, he was struck by two gunshots to the back, authorities confirmed. To date, the weapon used in the shooting has not been recovered by investigating officers.
Initially, Bellarmine Mugabe also faced a charge of attempted murder connected to the shooting. However, that charge was formally withdrawn after Matonhodze accepted a guilty plea for that offense. The charge of pointing a firearm to which Mugabe pleaded guilty stems from a separate, unconnected incident; South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) confirmed earlier this month that Mugabe had agreed to have both cases consolidated into a single hearing to streamline proceedings.
This is not the first time Mugabe has run afoul of the law across the Southern African region. In 2024, he was taken into custody in Zimbabwe’s border town of Beitbridge on allegations of assaulting a serving police officer. He was granted bail following that arrest, but local state-run newspaper *The Herald* reported at the time that an arrest warrant was subsequently reissued after Mugabe failed to appear for his scheduled court hearing. Just one year later, in 2025, he was arrested again on allegations of assaulting a security guard at a mining operation located in Mazowe, a town roughly an hour’s drive north of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. That case remains open and ongoing, with no final ruling issued as of the court’s latest decision in South Africa.
Bellarmine Mugabe is one of two sons born to former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his second wife, Grace Mugabe. The elder Mugabe, who ruled the southern African nation for 37 years, was removed from power in a military-led coup in 2017 and died in 2019.