NATIONAL Healing and Reconciliation Minister Moses Mzila-Ndlovu and a Catholic priest were arrested on Friday for attending a memorial service for victims of the 1980s Matabeleland genocide in Lupane.

Ndlovu and Father Marko Mabutho Mnkandla, who presided over Wednesday’s ceremony, are charged with “undermining police authority”, according to MDC secretary general and Regional Integration Minister, Priscilla Misihairabwi.

“Lawyers are trying to gain access to them but we understand that they are accused of addressing an unsanctioned public meeting,” Misihairabwi said from Harare.

Rights groups say over 20,000 people died in a crackdown in Matabeleland and the Midlands by government troops. Official reports on the massacres have never been published and public discussion on the operation by President Robert Mugabe's loyalists remains suppressed.

On Tuesday, Mzila-Ndlovu was barred by police from addressing a public meeting convened by the Habakkuk Trust at Kezi business centre in Matabeleland South. Kezi was one of the districts worst hit by the killings.

Matabeleland South police spokesman Sergeant Thabani Mkhwananzi later explained the meeting was broken off because Zanu PF and the MDC-T, who also have ministers seconded to the National Healing Organ, had not been represented.

Habakkuk Trust’s Dumisani Nkomo said: “I told the police that the meeting was non-political and there was no reasoning behind banning a talk that is pro-peace.

“But it seems apparent now that the problem must be coming from someone who does not want to see peace prevailing in the country.”

Mzila-Ndlovu is the second minister to be arrested, after the MDC-T’s Elton Mangoma, since the formation of a power sharing government in February 2009.