HARARE – Police have charged three MDC Alliance youth activists including an MP with lying about being tortured by suspected state security agents after they were arrested last month.
Harare West MP Joana Mamombe and activists Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova were detained at their lawyer’s offices on Wednesday, said MDC spokeswoman Fadzayi Mahere.
The three women were last month admitted to hospital with various injuries and alleged unidentified men who abducted them from a police station had subjected at least one of them to serious sexual violence. The arrests came as a team of United Nations experts called on Zimbabwe to stop “abductions and torture”, which they said were aimed at stifling dissent.
The three women were charged over their participation in a protest last month and were rearrested when visiting their lawyer to talk about that case.
“They are in police custody as we speak and they are still recovering from the torture they were subjected to,” Mahere said, adding that they now faced new charges of falsifying their previous ordeal.
“How can one falsify such degrees of inhuman and degrading treatment?” Mahere asked. “We are asking for the perpetrators to be brought to answer for what they did to these women. All they did was protest against hunger only to be subjected to all this.”
On Wednesday, nine United Nations special rapporteurs – who do not speak for the UN, but report their findings to it – called on Zimbabwe to drop the earlier charges against the women and stop the reported pattern of disappearances and torture.
“Targeting peaceful dissidents, including youth leaders, in direct retaliation for the exercise of their freedom of association, peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, is a serious violation of human rights law,” they said, adding that 49 cases of abduction and torture were reported in Zimbabwe last year.
Meanwhile, police on Wednesday charged lawyer Sylvester Hashiti with criminal insult. Hashiti, who was released into the custody of his lawyer Advocate Thabani Mpofu pending an appearance in court, is accused of accusing prosecutor Zivanai Mucharaga of taking a US$20,000 bribe from an unnamed former minister.
Hashiti allegedly made the accusation when the two men sparred in a courtroom where Hashiti was representing former mines minister Walter Chidhakwa and former permanent secretary Francis Gudyanga in their corruption trial.
Hashiti was on the legal team of MDC leader Nelson Chamisa when he unsuccessfully challenged his election defeat to President Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2018.
The lawyer became the sixth to be arrested inside a week. The Law Society of Zimbabwe condemned the arrest.
