TORTURE VICTIMS FINALLY RELEASED, TAKEN TO DOCTOR
Five young Zimbabwean opposition activists who were allegedly assaulted and tortured in police custody at the weekend, were granted bail and released on Monday.
Tom Spicer (18) an official in the youth wing of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, had to be supported by two colleagues holding his elbows when he emerged from the cells of the Harare Magistrate’s Court on Monday.
Also on Monday, lawyers and relatives of MDC MP Roy Bennett (44) said he and his bodyguard had disappeared after being arrested on Sunday at Chimanimani in south-east Zimbabwe.
They were removed early on Monday from the police station in the tourist village of Chimanimani. Police refused to state where he was.
”Roy and Mike Magaza (his bodyguard) are still missing,” said a relative who asked not to be named.
”Police are playing hide-the-prisoner again. They could be in any police station within a radius of
100km from here.”
Lawyers had travelled to several police stations and magistrates’ courts in the district during the day, ”but they are getting nowhere,” said the relative.
Bennett was arrested at a roadblock for allegedly failing to leave his farm, Charleswood, after receiving an eviction order under President Robert Mugabe’s campaign to seize white-owned land.
He had the eviction order set aside by the high court on the grounds that the farm’s official status as an ”export processing zone” — where he grows and processes crops for export -? legally exempts it from confiscation.
Both Bennett and Spicer have been subjected to harassment over the past two years because of their support of the MDC.
Spicer’s arrest on Thursday last week — on allegations of public violence — was the 11th time police have arrested him in two years.
Nine of the cases have been brought to court and all of them have been dismissed by magistrates.
The youth’s lawyer and his parents, Newton and Edwina Spicer, international television documentary producers, said he had been tortured on Friday by eight men who caned the soles of his feet, subjected him to electric shocks and beat and kicked him all over his body — concentrating on his kidneys.
The other four, Barnabas Ndira, Cosmas Ndira, Tendai Mlauzi and Reuben Tichareva, also MDC activists, were subjected to the same treatment, except for the electric shocks.
Newton Spicer said police had tried to attach the electrodes of the generator to Tom’s testicles, but, although his wrists were handcuffed behind his back, he had managed to fight his assailants off.
They eventually shocked him by clipping the electrodes to his ear instead, said Newton Spicer. All five were taken for medical examinations immediately after they each paid bail of ZD10 000
(about R1 100).
Lawyer Romualdo Mavedzende told magistrate Elizabeth Negonde that ”there are reports of assault and physical abuse against my clients.”
However, he said he would not deal with the issue in the magistrate’s court as it was already part of an application to the high court.
Senior assistant commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena, the police spokesman, issued a statement saying that Tom Spicer had appeared but ”the allegations that he was tortured were not raised in court”.
When told that they had been brought up, he said: ”We will await directives and certainly investigate this matter.”
In 1997, the supreme court ordered police to investigate the torture of local journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto. No action has been taken. – Sapa-AFP