Well-known Zimbabwean opposition legislator Trudy Stevenson has been attacked with stones and a machete by youths belonging to a rival opposition faction, reports in Harare said on Tuesday.
Stevenson had to be rushed to a private Harare hospital on Sunday after the attack, which left her with a deep gash to her head, a broken arm and wrist, a fractured cheek bone and bruises to her arms and chest, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported.
The attack happened near the low-income Harare suburb of Mabvuku, according to the paper.
Stevenson is part of a breakaway faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Arthur Mutambara, a businessman who entered frontline politics early this year.
The youths accused her of turning against founding MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, said the Herald. Four other MDC officials were reported to have been injured in the attack, two of them seriously.
”They attacked me using enormous boulders, some of which were bigger than my head. They actually intended to kill me as they kept shouting my name,” Stevenson told the Herald.
”I had never been physically attacked all my life and in all my years as an opposition politician. [The ruling] Zanu-PF [Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front] never physically harmed me,” she added.
”It really hurts to be harmed by people I used to work with,” she said ahead of undergoing an operation scheduled for Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the Mutambara-led MDC faction said the attack left them wondering what kind of democracy Tsvangirai and his supporters were fighting for.
”We put it on record that this is not the first time such violent acts have been committed by these thugs,” spokesperson Gabriel Chaibva said.
The MDC split late last year following sharp disagreements over whether the party should take part in elections for a new senate.
Tsvangirai was strongly opposed to participation, but other legislators, mostly now in the Mutambara-led faction, disagreed.
Stevenson is one of two white legislators still serving in Zimbabwe’s lower house.
Lawyer David Coltart, who until recently refused to take sides in the MDC split, announced last month he was joining the Mutambara-led faction because of what he said were unchecked violent tendencies among Tsvangirai’s supporters. — Sapa-dpa