Reporter quizzed over Mugabe’s ‘death list’
Police today questioned a journalist who reported that President Robert Mugabe’s Government has a death list for reporters and editors it believes support Zimbabwe’s political opposition.
Basildon Peta, an editor with the Financial Gazette and for the Independent in Britain, was summoned to the Harare Central Police station.
Police refused to comment on their reasons for questioning Peta, who said he had confirmation of a report in Zimbabwe’s Sunday Standard of a Government ‘‘hit list’’ that contained the names of most prominent figures working for publications outside state control.
The report said correspondents for foreign media were also being closely watched.
‘‘There is nothing I can do except hope for the best,’’ said Peta, the special projects editor at the Financial Gazette.
‘‘Bear in mind that more than 40 people have died and nine farmers have been killed - the threat is terrible,’’ he said.
Sunday Standard editor Mark Chavunduka was called in by police yesterday and warned they intended to prosecute him for ‘‘criminal libel’’ for reproducing an article published in South Africa that said Mugabe was terrified of the ghost of former guerrilla commander Josia Tongogara, who was killed in Mozambique in 1979.
Chavunduka was abducted and tortured with reporter Ray Choto in January 1999 after alleging unrest in the army because of losses in the civil war in Congo.
He denied he had defamed anyone by reprinting the South African report and demanded to know who lodged the report.
The independently-owned Daily News and Zimbabwe Mirror have both been warned of imminent prosecution for alleging police complicity in violence on farms.
