Zimbabwean riot police arrested the country's top opposition leader on Sunday as they suppressed a planned prayer rally in a crackdown on protests against President Robert Mugabe.
Witnesses said heavily armed police fought skirmishes with rock-throwing opposition supporters in the Harare township of Highfield, where organisers had planned a Sunday prayer rally to address Zimbabwe's deepening political and economic crisis.
Police arrested Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition officials after blocking their motor convoy from driving to the stadium where the rally was to have been held.
"Mr Tsvangirai has also been arrested. He was arrested as he was driving out of Highfield," MDC information officer Luke Tamborinyoka told Reuters. "We don't know where he is being held at the moment."
Officials had earlier said that Arthur Mutambara, who leads another faction of the MDC, and Lovemore Madhuku of the pressure group National Constitutional Assembly were detained.
In a statement, the organising Save Zimbabwe Campaign said lawyers were being denied access to the detained and that police had arrested five student activists at a workshop in Harare.
The group charged that riot squads had forced shops, bars and churches to shut down for the day, and in some cases assaulted patrons in townships beer halls.
"Highfield has been turned into a war zone," it said.
PRAYERS AND TEAR GAS:
Riot police moved in force early on Sunday to head off the rally, which police said would violate a ban on political protests imposed after opposition supporters clashed with police in Highfield last month.
Organisers had argued that the ban should not apply to a prayer vigil. Witnesses said later in the day police had fired teargas at youths who were throwing stones at their patrols, taunting them and defying orders not move around in large numbers.
"There have been several skirmishes between the police and some youths, people throwing stones, and the police firing teargas," a Zimbabwean journalist who lives in Highfield told a Reuters correspondent by phone.