Zimbabwe's justice minister has threatened to prosecute
three female opposition members who allege they were arrested and then abducted
from police custody and sexually assaulted.
They say they were beaten and forced to drink each other's
urine. The three, including an MP, are being treated in hospital for their
injuries.
Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi said the women made up the
story to divert attention from the fact that they broke lockdown rules by
attending a protest.
They should be arrested for violating rules aimed at
stopping the spread of coronavirus, he said.
"I don't believe the abduction is genuine," Mr
Ziyambi told the BBC.
Opposition activists allege that abduction and torture
remains a tactic of the authorities even after the end the presidency of Robert
Mugabe, who was overthrown in 2017.
Cecilia Chimbiri, who is a youth campaigner with the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, has given graphic
testimony to the BBC of how she, MP Joana Mamombe and Netsai Marowa, were
maltreated over 24 hours by alleged state agents.
She said that they were stopped at a police checkpoint last
Wednesday, as they were returning from a small protest march that they had
organised in the capital, Harare, over the number of people going hungry during
the coronavirus lockdown.
Two men in police uniforms stepped out an unmarked car, Ms
Chimbiri explained, and told them that they were under arrest for flouting
restrictions.
"They must have been following us," she said.
They were then escorted in a convoy to a police station
where they were told to get out of their car and into another vehicle as they
had gone to the wrong place.
It was then that Ms Chimbiri said men in plain clothes got
into the vehicle, pushed their heads down and drove them out of the basement
car park.
They were then driven to a location that she later learnt
was about 120km (75 miles) north of Harare, where they were thrown into a pit
dug into the earth outside and subjected to hours of beatings and sexual
assault by five men, the activist said.
"I was praying and screaming inside the pit. At one
point, I prayed for a swift death. I was in so much pain," Ms Chimbiri
told the BBC on the phone from her hospital bed.
The three were left on Thursday night at the roadside on
the outskirts of Bindura town, north of the capital.
The police have a different version of events.
Despite the fact that private and state-run newspapers
reported on Thursday, a day after they went missing, that the police had
confirmed the women's arrest, the police later denied making the statement.
The justice minister said it was important to remember that
the women had been involved in an illegal protest.
"Firstly there is a pandemic, and the world over
people are being told to stay home. They decide to break that," Mr Ziyambi
said.
"The lockdown has created an environment where they
are no longer relevant. They wanted relevance. It is diversionary tactic and
once they are discharged [from hospital] they must be arrested for breaking the
law."
The women are now under police guard at a private Harare
hospital.
The MP's condition is said to have deteriorated and she was
in no condition to speak to the BBC and Ms Marowa was asleep when the BBC tried
to contact her.
Dr Fortune Nyamande, who is the chairperson of Zimbabwe
Doctors for Human Rights and is treating them, said a trend of such abductions
had been witnessed over the last two years.
He refused to divulge the extent of their injuries, but
said that he had been been trying to get them in a stable psychological state
while attending to the physical injuries.
"We have attended to almost 1,000 cases of these
extra-judicial measures with the same modus operandi. They seem to be on the
rise, and it is time that the state holds whoever is doing that
accountable," he told the BBC.
But Ms Chimibiri has little faith that will happen.
Umbrella group the Human Rights NGO Forum says that since
President Emmerson Mnangagwa came into power in November 2017, it has
documented and verified a series of organised violent incidents.
These include 24 extra-judicial killings, 23 cases of
sexual assault, 92 abductions and beatings, 88 gunshots wounds or dog bites and
893 cases of assault.
The government has suggested that a third force or hidden
hand is behind the spate of abductions under President Mnangagwa, who replaced
Mr Mugabe.
The accusation is that people are bent on discrediting his
government, whose investigations have yielded no arrests in the majority of
cases. BBC
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