Tanya seeks gag order to hide 'dark past'

Tanya seeks gag order to hide 'dark past'

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By Staff Reporter

LAWYERS for the Zimbabwean teenage girl at the centre of the sex-for-asylum scandal in Britain have threatened New Zimbabwe.com with a High Court gag order to stop publication of our investigation on her dark past.

The 18-year-old girl, identified in newspaper reports as Tanya, was involved in a newspaper sting operation in which a senior British immigration official begged for sex with a promise to speed up her asylum claim.

Immigration Minister Tony McNulty lost his job following the revelations which added to a long list of Home Office blunders on asylum and immigration.

In an interview with The Observer newspaper, Tanya claimed she was raped by an official from Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu PF party and later forced to marry an official from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

But as New Zimbabwe.com published the first account of "the truth about Tanya" last Friday, her lawyers threatened to obtain a High Court injunction, claiming we were invading her privacy.

The lawyers also claimed our revelations about Tanya were defamatory.

The lawyers said: "We have sight of the article, 'Tanya: Cutting through the web of lies', which has now been published and we write to request that it is removed from the website forthwith.

"The allegations about our client's supposed immorality, numerous affairs and promiscuity are as distressing as they are untrue. Our client was expelled from school, but this was for simple non-attendance and not for the reasons the (article) describes.

"Our client, already vulnerable, has been deeply distressed by recent events and was particularly upset by the (article)."

New Zimbabwe.com editor, Mduduzi Mathuthu, said: "Every Zimbabwean will rightly be shocked that a teenage girl who took great delight in appearing on the front pages of Britain's national newspapers making serious allegations against other people should cry privacy when those people respond to her slurs.

"While New Zimbabwe.com praises her efforts at revealing corruption at the Home Office, the accompanying claims of rape and a forced marriage have left a lot of lingering questions on our readers' minds and we believe it is in the public interest that answers to these questions are found."

Mathuthu said New Zimbabwe.com would go ahead and publish its expose` on Tanya starting Tuesday.
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