"Police have again changed charges on Roy Bennett. They have now charged him with treason," the MDC statement said.
"These charges are scandalous, vexatious and without bases in law, but
are simply politically motivated, simply intended to justify the
continued incarceration of Roy Bennett," it added.
His lawyer, Trust Maanda, still at the police station in the eastern
city of Mutare, where Bennett was taken after his arrest, could not be
reached.
The swearing-in of Zimbabwe’s new unity government by President Robert
Mugabe earlier Friday was marred by the arrest of Bennett, a white
farmer who became treasurer of Tsvangirai’s MDC.
He had been set to become the deputy minister for agriculture.
Bennett, who returned just last month from three years of self-imposed
exile in South Africa – where he had fled to escape charges of plotting
to kill Mugabe – was arrested at an airport on the outskirts of Harare,
the MDC said.
Bennett was among the most striking names on Tsvangirai’s cabinet list,
which made for an unlikely partnership with some of Mugabe’s oldest and
toughest allies.
Bennett’s Charleswood farm was expropriated under Mugabe’s land reforms
in 2003, and the following year he was jailed for eight months for
assault after he punched the justice minister during a heated debate in
parliament on the land programme.
In 2006, he fled to neighbouring South Africa to escape arrest after being implicated in the alleged plot to kill Mugabe.
Such allegations have been made but never substantiated against much of the MDC leadership.
Bennett was born into a farm family in 1957 in the town of Rusape. He
eventually started his own coffee plantation in Chimanimani, a lush
region near the border with Mozambique, where he grew into one of
Zimbabwe’s top exporters of the crop. – AFP