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Alert

Police raid newspaper's office

(MISA/IFEX) - During the week of 3 October 2006, four detectives from the police's Law and Order section visited the Harare distribution offices of "The Zimbabwean", a weekly newspaper published in London, and demanded certain information from the proprietor before confiscating some documents.

They were particularly interested in the previous week's issue, although they did not specify which article had attracted their attention. In it, the front page story, headlined "ZNA top brass slam corrupt ZRP", had outlined the tensions between the army and the police after the arrest of a former colonel for alleged corruption at the state grain monopoly, the Grain Marketing Board.

The detectives took away documents pertaining to the importation of the weekly newspaper from South Africa, where the southern African edition is printed. "We will not be intimidated by any bully-boy tactics on the part of the police or anybody else," said UK-based publisher Wilf Mbanga.

"Our mandate is to be a beacon for freedom of expression and of the press in Zimbabwe and we intend to continue doing that, no matter what", Mbanga told the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Zimbabwe.