Biti Receives Death Threats After Brief Arrest In Karoi

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.