Police faked 'MDC bombers' evidence, 13 freed

Police faked 'MDC bombers' evidence, 13 freed

POLICE spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena with some of the alleged bomb-making equipment police linked to MDC activists

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By Angus Shaw

A ZIMBABWEAN judge ruled police faked evidence against opposition activists accused of mounting a gasoline bombing campaign and freed them after five months in jail, the activists' lawyer said Thursday.

A day earlier, police assaulted scores of reform campaigners who staged a demonstration in Harare, victims said. Many were hospitalised, several with broken bones, according to witnesses and an independent victims care group.

The developments are the latest in a series of escalating run-ins between Zimbabwe's authoritarian government led by President Robert Mugabe and the country's increasingly vocal opposition.

The unrest has been marked by an ongoing political crisis and spreading economic woes, highlighted by rampant inflation. Mugabe rejects criticism that the meltdown is the result of mismanagement and the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms he ordered beginning in 2000, and instead blames Western sanctions.

Attorney Alex Muchadehama said 13 activists of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, including opposition lawmaker Paul Madzore, were released Wednesday after High Court Judge Lawrence Kamocha threw out all key police evidence.

Kamocha ruled police failed to show the location on maps of a farm where the suspects were allegedly trained in terror tactics and concluded in his written judgment "it turned out to be nonexistent."

He also said two men police had called key witnesses were "fictitious persons."

Muchadehama said Kamocha would still consider release applications for two other activists held on charges of allegedly recruiting pro-democracy militants for terror attacks.

No comment was immediately available from police or the government.

Defense attorneys Muchahedama and Andrew Makoni were arrested earlier after they described evidence as faked. Their arrests led to a protest organized by the Zimbabwe Law Society outside the Harare High Court in May. Police declared the lawyers' protest illegal and injured a number of lawyers while breaking it up.

Muchadehama said 34 opposition activists detained since March were linked to a series of fire bombings of police stations, a store owned by a ruling party official and a train. Four police were said to have been injured in the bombings, which the government described as an "orgy of terror" and blamed the opposition.

The opposition has routinely denied taking any violent action and accused the government of stage managing the bombings to discredit it. Government opponents, meanwhile, say that they have been subjected to police beatings and raids on their offices.

No opposition activists have been convicted in the alleged campaign of anti-government violence and only two suspects linked to the 13 men freed Wednesday remain in jail.

The National Constitutional Assembly, meanwhile, said about 160 of its supporters campaigning for constitutional reform outside the Parliament in downtown Harare were arrested Wednesday for staging an illegal protest.

Demonstrators, including six women carrying babies on their backs, were forced onto trucks and taken to the central Harare police station where they were assaulted, said Lovemore Madhuku, head of the reform group.

He said the intensity of the police beatings -- now customary for protesters -- was "10 times more than before."

In March, Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders were hospitalised after being assaulted by police, who broke up a prayer meeting declared illegal. - AP
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