JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 116 ____________________________________________________________________ interfere with police investigations and whether he may commit further crimes. In the light of these considerations, the lawfulness of the continued detention of Mr Moyo and Mr Mapombere was highly questionable. On two separate occasions the investigating officers decided that there was no reason to continue to detain them and that they should be released. The policemen must, therefore have believed that the two men would not abscond and would not interfere with investigations. On the first occasion they were actually released but then re-detained on the instructions of a senior officer. On the second occasion the investigating officers were about to release them when they were ordered by a senior officer to continue to detain them. Despite strenuous efforts to do so, the prosecutor was unable to obtain instructions from senior police officers, all of whom had seemingly made themselves deliberately uncontactable by switching off their cell phones. These actions on the part of senior officers suggest that they had no proper basis for giving the instruction that the two prisoners should continue to be detained. If they had some valid basis for issuing the instruction, they would surely have informed the prosecutor about it and would have been willing to come to court to testify about it. Their failure to advance any reasons for their instructions leads to a suspicion that they were acting on the basis of “orders” given by politicians to keep the two men in custody. An additional factor was that the two men had been unlawfully denied access to their lawyers. After a brief initial meeting with their lawyers when they were first arrested, the two men were denied access to their lawyers until the High Court ordered that such access be allowed. The response of The Herald to the case The Herald was quick to use this case for propaganda purposes. On 5 June 2002 it published an article entitled “British meddling”. The first two paragraphs of this article read: “Investigations into the alleged plot by Law Society of Zimbabwe president Mr Sternford Moyo and secretary Mr Wilbert Mapombere to topple the Government point to a heavy involvement of the British High Commission in Harare, sources said yesterday.