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Judge rules terror campaign evidence faked by police in Zimbabwe
Associated Press
July 26, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/26/africa/AF-GEN-Zimbabwe-Terror-Campaign.php

HARARE, Zimbabwe: A 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 hospitalized, several with broken bones, according to witnesses and an independent victims care group.

Attorney Alex Muchadehama said 13 activists of the main 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 but did not produce to testify were "fictitious persons who did not exist."

Muchadehama said Kamocha was still to consider release applications for two other activists held on different charges of allegedly recruiting pro-democracy militants for terror attacks. No comment was immediately available from police or the government.

During the trial, defense attorneys Muchahedama and Andrew Makoni themselves were arrested after they described evidence given in court as having been faked. Their arrests led to a protest demonstration 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 breaking it up.

Muchadehama said 34 opposition activists have been detained since March on allegations of involvement in a series of petrol 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, 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 are still in jail.

Zimbabwe is in the midst of an economic and political crisis, with inflation officially at 4,500 percent but estimated to be twice as high, and government opponents under intense pressure. Mugabe rejects criticism that the meltdown is the result of mismanagement and often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms he ordered beginning in 2000, instead blaming Western sanctions.

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 who included 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 hospitalized after being assaulted by police who broke up a prayer meeting declared illegal.

A woman protester, speaking on condition of anonymity from her hospital bed Thursday, said the group was released without charge after more than four hours of beatings with riot sticks, fists and kicking and stamping. Hospital officials said she was being treated for severe bruising and trauma.

The infants were separated from their mothers and cried at one end of the cells while the beatings went on.

None of the group was charged under sweeping security laws or fined for violating a blanket ban on demonstrations.

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