By  Violet Gonda

A Harare magistrate on Thursday denied bail to Farai Maguwu and remanded him in custody. Maguwu is the diamond researcher who was arrested last Thursday, shortly after giving evidence to the Kimberley Process monitor to Zimbabwe, Abbey Chikane, about the volatile situation in the Chiadzwa diamond fields.

Maguwu's lawyers intend to file an urgent High Court application on Friday against the denial of bail and to challenge the ruling by the magistrate to place him on remand on the basis of 'contradictory & self destructive' evidence placed by the State in court'.

Police claim to have found documents which contain falsehoods about the human rights violations in the Chiadzwa area in March.

Maguwu's lawyer, Tinoziva Bere, who is also a human rights defender, told SW Radio Africa that the prosecution team knows they will not be able to secure a conviction based on the evidence brought to the court, but the case is a deliberate attempt to silence people doing advocacy work on the controversial diamond fields.

Maguwu accuses the Kimberley Process monitor of shopping him to the police. His lawyers said the police told the court they'd be travelling to South Africa to get evidence from Chikane.

Bere said since Maguwu's arrest last week the police have failed to be consistent about the charges he is facing. When Maguwu was initially arrested he was informed the reason was the communication that he had made to Chikane. But this changed when he was first formally charged and that charge did not make any reference to the KP monitor. It accused the activist of sending information via email to exiled human rights lawyer Gabriel Shumba and an Anton Dekker, from the Netherlands.

But the lawyer said on the court day a different charge appeared, which was the one on the record. This says Maguwu published falsehoods and sent them to Gabriel Shumba, Anton Dekker and Tor Olsen, a coordinator of the Zimbabwe Europe Network.

Bere added: "Then during the evidence to the court by the investigation officer, Detective Inspector Dowa, he then revisited allegations that he was going to be visiting Abbey Chikane in South Africa to collect documents. So it is like a cycle but it still includes Chikane."

The lawyer said in a normal country a government should investigate allegations of human rights abuses and not arrest the person who has raised the complaints. Bere said the KP monitor should have also investigated these allegations before reporting to the very people implicated in the abuses in the diamond fields. "But in this case the mouth that has raised the alarm is the one that is being silenced," he said.

"The larger purpose is to close down the Centre for Research and Development. The larger purpose is to silence this voice that is speaking for the silent people in Marange."

"When they say they can't grant him bail because he may run away or he may interfere with the witnesses - the witnesses are senior police officers and senior police personnel. There could never be interference by an unarmed individual like Farai Maguwu and Chikane can never be interfered with by Farai Maguwu because he is the one who actually complained about Farai Maguwu."

"Eventually when the Kimberley Process has run its course and maybe Zimbabwe has been admitted, they (Zim authorities) will lose interest in Maguwu. But while the issue is hot now they want him in jail," said Maguwu's lawyer.

Meanwhile a leaked interim report to the Kimberley Process by the South African monitor recommends that Zimbabwe be allowed to resume diamond exports from the Chiadzwa diamond fields. This internal report is due to be debated on Monday by the Kimberley Process Working Group on Monitoring (WGM).

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