Militias associated with Robert Mugabe have begun burning family members of the political opposition alive:
The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.
An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.
The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.
Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.
Ed:
The UN and the South African Development Community has sat mostly silent while Mugabe rigged election results in order to conduct an unnecessary run-off between himself and Morgan Tsvangirai, who won the first round of voting. Since then, Mugabe and his henchmen have harassed and imprisoned Tsvangirai and conducted a campaign of terror against districts that voted for MDC in the first contest. Now they have resorted to murder, and not just murder but brutality that demonstrates Mugabe’s thirst for power.
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