Zimbabwe: 35 opposition leaders released, including Jameson Timba

A Zimbabwean court on Wednesday freed an opposition leader and 34 activists after handing them suspended prison sentences for taking part in what authorities called an unlawful assembly.

Magistrate Collet Ncube sentenced Jameson Timba, interim leader of a faction of the breakaway Citizens Coalition for Change party, to a two-year suspended prison sentence after he and the activists were detained for more than five months. The activists received lesser prison sentences, and also fully suspended.

The magistrate convicted Timba and the activists last week. He acquitted 30 others who had been detained alongside Timba.

Police arrested them at Timba's residence in the capital, Harare, and charged them with disturbing the peace and participating in a gathering with intent to promote violence, breach of the peace or sectarianism. The court acquitted them of the disturbing the peace charges in September.

Their lawyers said they were at the house for a barbecue to commemorate the Day of the African Child, an event on the African Union calendar.

Amnesty International described the detention as "part of a worrying pattern of repression" by Zimbabwean authorities under President Emmerson Mnangagwa and called for an investigation into allegations that some of the activists were tortured while in police custody.

Mnangagwa's ruling ZANU-PF party has long been accused of using the police and courts to stifle opposition, particularly under former autocratic President Robert Mugabe, who ruled for 37 years before Mnangagwa replaced him in a 2017 coup.