Vermeulen granted bail and ordered to surrender passport
By Tichaona Sibanda
3 November 2006

Mark Vermeulen, the 27 year-old Zimbabwe Test cricketer, was on Friday granted bail by a Harare magistrate after he was arrested Wednesday for two arson attacks in the capital.

Vermeulen is alleged to have torched both the Zimbabwe Cricket Academy and an office at Zimbabwe Cricket’s headquarters amid reports he could be suffering from mental instability.

Our cricket source said Vermeulen was granted $500 000 bail and ordered to surrender his travel documents. He was also ordered to pay a surety of $300 000 and will report to the police daily until his next court appearance on 14th November.

Investigations by Newsreel reveal a sad sequence of events involving Vermeulen ever since he received head injuries on two occasions while playing cricket against India and Australia. Both times he was hit on the head with a ball and suffered skull fractures. Though he has been known to possess a volatile temper, his mental state was put under scrutiny recently when he walked to the gates of Robert Mugabe’s fortified official residence in Harare, demanding an audience with him as the patron of Zimbabwe Cricket.

A source told us he wanted to tell Mugabe to sort out the mess in cricket, but was told by the security agents to write down his grievances so that they could be forwarded to the cricket patron. On Monday before the attack at the ZC offices Vermeulen had told colleagues he was considering going back to Mugabe’s residence because he had not yet responded to his grievances.

All this comes amid reports Zimbabwe Cricket sent him to seek psychiatric help in the capital last year when they noticed his irritable behaviour after his two head injuries. Only last Saturday on a visit to Takashinga cricket club in Highfields, he violently threw a beer bottle towards a group of patrons in an unprovoked attack but it hit the floor and shattered.

He had to be escorted from the premises for his own safety after the patrons threatened to beat him up. On Monday, he was reportedly escorted from the South African embassy where he was trying to obtain a visa to travel to Johannesburg when he threatened to ‘sort out’ staff at the offices. He was eventually granted the Visa.