British and US diplomats held in Zimbabwe after six-mile car chase

Published on Thursday 5 June 2008 22:25

RELATIONS with Zimbabwe plunged to a new low yesterday as British and United States diplomats investigating political violence were subjected to a wild, six-mile road chase by police before being taken into custody for five hours.

Their vehicles were stopped at a roadblock and all four tyres of a 4x4 belonging to the US embassy in Harare were slashed by policemen, who also punched a local security official working for the Americans.

William McGee, the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, told reporters the unnamed diplomats had been travelling in three vehicles. He said he received word of the ambush and arrests in a phone call from his diplomats, and then sent embassy security officials to assist them. But they also were detained.

The ambassador, who has a reputation as an outspoken critic of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF administration, said: "The government is trying to intimidate diplomats from travelling to the countryside in order to witness the violence.

"The bottom line is this: Zimbabwe is a lawless country. The government of Zimbabwe is not following their own laws nor international law."

He said the detention was a clear attempt by the government to stop outside observers witnessing attacks against the opposition and its supporters.

The British government said it had summoned Zimbabwe's ambassador in London to explain what had happened.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said the UK diplomats were unharmed and that no violence had been directed at them, but he described the incident as "serious". He said: "I think that it gives us a window into the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, because this sort of intimidation is something that is suffered daily, especially by those working with opposition groups."

Mr McGee said the policemen who gave chase to the diplomats and detained them had been joined by army officers and so-called "war veterans" – militiamen who fought under Mr Mugabe in Zimbabwe's independence war – who pulled a gun on the westerners. "Police reached in and grabbed telephones from my personnel, and the war veterans threatened to burn the vehicles with my people inside unless they got out," he said.

"My officials (in the embassy] felt the orders were coming directly from the top (of the Zimbabwe government]."

The British and US officials had been talking to opposition activists and victims of political violence when they were approached by police officers and ordered to a nearby police station, Mr McGee said.

The diplomats refused and, after phoning their embassies in Harare, set off in their vehicles in different directions. Two were stopped but the other made it back to Harare.

Bright Matonga, Zimbabwe's deputy information minister, said the government would protest to the British and US embassies. "(The diplomats] are very mischievous and we won't tolerate that," he said.

"We know they're not diplomats. We know they're from British intelligence.

"If they've nothing to hide, why did they run away?"

PROFILE

WILLIAM McGEE, US ambassador and a three-times decorated Vietnam veteran, has displayed a remarkable willingness to anger President Robert Mugabe .

He travelled with British, Dutch, Japanese and Tanzanian diplomats last month to a suspected torture centre in the Zimbabwean countryside. He has also visited the private Avenues Clinic in the capital , crowded with wounded victims of violence by Mr Mugabe's security forces.

Mr McGee said there was conclusive evidence the camp was an interrogation centre, with small cells where people had been imprisoned overnight or longer.