Newsmen charged over Mugabe report
HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) -- Zimbabwean police have charged three journalists over a report that President Robert Mugabe had commandeered a passenger plane from the national airline for personal travel, their lawyer said.
Linda Cook said on Sunday police had told her that Iden Wetherell, editor of the private weekly Zimbabwe Independent, news editor Vincent Kahiya and senior reporter Dumisani Muleya would spend a second night in jail before going to court on Monday.
Police arrested the men on Saturday after the paper reported in a front-page article the day before that Mugabe, who is on annual leave, had ordered an Air Zimbabwe plane from the capital Harare to take him from Malaysia to Indonesia. It said passengers had been left stranded.
"The three have been charged with criminal defamation. We deny the charges and we believe that they are spurious...The story is true and these are matters of legitimate public scrutiny involving the most senior person in the country," Cook told Reuters on Sunday.
In remarks carried by state media on Saturday, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo called the newspaper's report "absurd and criminally false" and said it would be held accountable.
The Zimbabwe Independent, like most other privately owned newspapers, has been critical of Mugabe's government as the country grapples with a political and economic crisis widely blamed on government mismanagement.
The government accuses private media houses of driving a Western-led propaganda campaign against it, in retaliation for its seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution among landless blacks.
More than a dozen journalists have been arrested and charged under legislation introduced soon after Mugabe's controversial re-election in 2002 that tightened controls on the media and set tougher penalties for the publication of false reports.
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