Police continued to remove confiscated computer equipment from the offices of the independent Daily News on Tuesday as lawyers struggled to get a court hearing to stop authorities closing the newspaper down, company officials said.
”Police are camped there (in the paper’s central Harare offices),” said Sam Sipepa Nkomo, chief executive of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, which owns the newspaper.
”They took 26 computers and servers yesterday, and today they want to remove more things. But now we have decided not to co-operate with them. Now they will have to break doors if they want to get anything else,” he said.
Heavily armed police stormed into the Daily News premises on Friday and declared the paper ”banned” following a controversial supreme court ruling that said the newspaper was ”illegal” because it had not registered with a state-controlled press watchdog.
On Tuesday authorities continued their offensive against the paper, the country’s biggest circulation daily, by pulling out the newsroom’s computers and then dumping them in the back of a truck.
Throughout the affair, police have produced no warrants or court orders authorising their action. Nkomo said he did not know where the equipment was taken.
”They don’t bother about how they handled it,” he said. ”Some of the computers were lying loose in the back of a truck.”
On Tuesday the company filed an application for an urgent hearing with a high court judge to order authorities to stop ransacking the offices and to allow it to resume publishing.
However, Nkomo said lawyers had only been able to secure a hearing with Judge Younis Omerjee at about midday on Thursday.
”The judge said he was only given the papers today, and he needed time to go through them,” said Nkomo.
He said the aim of the banning and the seizure of property was ”to cripple us financially”.
”They have put us in difficult spot,” he said. ”They know it will be impossible to go on carrying things like salaries while we are outside and not getting income.
”If it goes on much longer, by the end of next week, then I think other strategies will need to be adopted. I am hoping the court will make this matter clear tomorrow (Thursday).”
The Daily News has been bombed twice, had editors, journalists and other staff arrested, and many of them beaten up and tortured, and also is subjected to vilification in the state-run media which accuses it of being controlled by the British government. – Sapa