The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) said Harare lawyer and opposition politician, Tendai Biti was arrested by police in Karoi early on Saturday and later released without a charge.
Biti, a former Finance Minister and critic of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government also received deaths threats after a heated telephone conversation with a person identifying himself as Gakanjwe. ZLHR posted on Twitter:
At about 09:25 hours today, we received a distress call from [Tendai Biti] advising us that he had been arrested by police in Karoi. He was not informed of any charge. He was eventually released without any charges against him.
[Biti] has since advised us that he has been receiving death threats. This follows a heated telephone conversation with a person identifying himself as Gakanjwe quizzing [Biti about] tweeting on [government’s] failure to deal with COVID-19.
According to ZLHR, at about 4 PM today, they received another distress call that some unidentified people two men and a woman were affixing cardboard boxes with threatening messages at Tendai Biti Law Firm in Harare.
This follows a press statement on COVID-19 situation by ZANU PF in which [Biti] was mentioned.
Our member lawyer [Biti] has been subjected to harassment, ill-treatment, prosecution and persecution in recent months.
The three people who put up the cardboard boxes with those messages, threatened to come back and burn down the law firm.