Left for dead by Mugabe's police

"...an armed group from the Central Intelligence Organisation, Mugabe's secret police, picked him and four others up last week, dragging them away from their work in the fields, and driving them to an isolated hill...

After three days of this and other maltreatment, with no food or water, he lost consciousness. He woke up in a local clinic with two of the others. All three were in very poor physical condition. Two more were missing. .... two local villagers who found Dube and his friends...

The three of them were piled on top of


each other like garbage, and some shrubs had been thrown over them. I think their captors believed they were dead."

The two missing men were dead. Their shallow graves were found on land 15km away. They were re-buried at their village.

A government source confirms that for the past month there has been a deployment of CIO squads in Matabeleland, to counter an alleged campaign of violence by MDC activists in what is an opposition stronghold.

"The President believes that villagers there have always been against his rule, and will do anything to throw him out of power," said the source.

The Minister of State Security, Didymus Mutasa, was typically blunt when asked to comment. "Write what you want to write, it will not change us," he said.