JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 134 ____________________________________________________________________ wrecked five of The Daily News’s six presses, blew the roof off the warehouse and damaged rolls of newsprint 20 yards away. Five days earlier, the Minister for Information, Professor Jonathan Moyo, had said the independent daily would be silenced because it posed a risk to the nation. A few days earlier Dr Chenjerai Hunzvi, the late veterans’ leader, had declared that he would “ban” the paper. His promise was carried out by ruling party mobs who, watched by police, set up illegal roadblocks outside Harare and confiscated copies of The Daily News and other independent newspapers. In an earlier veterans’ demonstration, Daily News journalists were assaulted and steel bolts fired from catapults smashed windows of its offices. No one has been arrested or prosecuted in respect of this attack. On 29 August 2002 the offices of a private radio station, the Voice of the People, was bombed by three men. The men were armed. They scaled the wall of the property at about 1.00 am. They held the security guard at gunpoint and then one of the men threw a bomb into the building. The building was set on fire by the explosion and the roof was blown off. The security guard reported the bombing to the police. Property worth millions of dollars was destroyed including computer equipment, files and office furniture. The police and government officials immediately started to speculate that this bombing may have been carried out by “enemies of the state” intent on embarrassing the government ahead of an important international conference in South Africa that was to be attended by President Mugabe. A few days after the bombing the police arrested the MDC Member of Parliament for an Harare constituency and another senior MDC member. The police told their lawyer that they had arrested his clients on the strength of a tip-off contained in a letter sent anonymously to the police. The men were released several days later after the Attorney-General’s office decided that there was no evidence upon which a prosecution could be brought. The MDC officials’ lawyer severely criticised the police for arresting his clients on the basis of an anonymous letter and alleged that his clients had been arrested simply because they were members of the MDC. An MDC spokesperson also criticised the police action, saying that the arrests on the basis of the anonymous letter showed “the transformation of the police into a ZANU (PF) militia …”172