Lu Ke, a China national who was arrested in July last year for capturing videos of children using racist language in Lilongwe’s Njewa area, Thursday walked to freedom after the Lilongwe Principal Resident Magistrate Court sentenced him to 12 months in prison.
Lu, commonly known as Susu, walked to freedom after he had already spent 12 months in jail.
Lilongwe Principal Resident Magistrate Rodrick Michongwe convicted Susu on his own guilty plea.
COMPENSATION—
Malunda
During Thursday’s court appearance, State lawyer Dzikondianthu Malunda told the court that Susu had paid K16 million as compensation to 13 children he exploited as part of plea-bargaining.
Michongwe has since ordered Susu to leave the country within seven days.
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“Although he is a first-time offender and has agreed to compensate the children with K16 million and deposited the money with Malawi Government, the offence is serious and the mitigations outweigh subjecting the children to abuse. As such, he needed tough punishment to deter would-be offenders,” Michongwe said.
Meanwhile, one of the friends of the court who fought for the arrest of Susu, namely Alexous Kamangira, has said there are a lot of questions than answers to what has happened.
“I think K16 million as compensation for 13 children is a serious joke. How much did Lu Ke earn from selling those videos? Only when we are able to assess the benefit would the compensation question start making sense; otherwise, this all smells fish.” Kamangira said.
Susu was arrested in Chipata, Zambia, last year.
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He fled Malawi after a BBC Africa Eye investigation revealed that he was exploiting children by telling them to appear in his videos, including one in which the children chanted “I am a black monster and my IQ is low”.
He shot many of his videos at Njewa, just outside the capital in Lilongwe, where he was paying children less than K1,000 a day to make hundreds of videos which he sold for K77 million.
