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MDC Secretary-General Biti's whereabouts unknown
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 13 - 06 - 2008


The whereabouts of Tendai Biti, Secretary General
of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change, are still unknown a day
after his arrest on treason charges on his return to Zimbabwe,
lawyers said Friday, according to dpa.
At the same time, lawyers applied to the high court in Harare for
commissioner-general of police Augustine Chihuri to be jailed for
contempt of court for disobeying earlier court orders to release MDC
MP and senior advocate Eric Matinenga.
"We have not been given access to Mr Biti," his lawyer, Lewis
Uriri, said Friday. We have tried to find him in police stations all
over Harare, but we don't know where he is." He was speaking shortly
after Harare high court judge Ben Hlatshwayo gave police until 10 am
on Saturday to present him in court.
Biti was seized and handcuffed by five men in plainclothes on
Thursday at Harare airport as he returned from South Africa after two
months abroad, mostly spent lobbying support against President Robert
Mugabe's regime.
Police said he was charged with treason over a controversial
document said to have been an MDC policy paper, but police did not
indicate why treason charges were brought. The MDC dismissed the
document as a fraud immediately after it was circulated in April.
The document claimed that the MDC would return to white farmers
all land seized by Mugabe since 2000, and that all police and army
officers would lose their jobs in a new MDC government.
The last time the government invoked charges of treason was in
2002, against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, over a meeting with a
Canadian "consultant" where he was alleged to have called for Mugabe
to be overthrown and killed.
At the end of the two-year trial, the "treason plot" charges were
dismissed and shown to be a deliberate plot by a notorious Iraqi-born
con-man who was paid 500,000 US dollars by Mugabe's government.
Biti is also charged with making a statement "prejudicial to the
security of the state," for announcing the day after presidential and
parliamentary elections on March 29, that party leader Morgan
Tsvangirai had won 50.4 per cent of votes cast and was the outright
winner of parliamentary elections. Police claim that only the state-
run election commission is allowed to announce election results.
The commission took five more weeks to announce the result, and
gave Tsvangirai 48 per cent over Mugabe's 43 per cent, so that the
former national labour leader failed to win more than 50 per cent
needed for victory.
Five days have expired since the high court ordered that
Matinenga, MP for a constituency in south-east Zimbabwe, be released
"immediately."
He was arrested on allegations of "inciting violence" in his
Buhera South constituency on May 31, only for a magistrate to throw
out the charges five days later. Police then arrested him a second
time, at dawn at his Harare home, on the same charges the magistrate
had dismissed.
Uriri said Matinenga was still in police custody. "We went to
court today to seek the committal of the commissioner of police for
contempt of court," he said.
Lawyers say Matinenga aroused the ire of senior figures in
Mugabe's regime, after he won a court order against the army who had
deployed soldiers into his constituency and were attacking MDC
supporters.


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