Zanzibar police arrest 24 after
violence
ALI SULTAN
Associated Press
ZANZIBAR, Tanzania
- Zanzibar police have arrested 24 people in
connection with election violence in which police shot and
injured eight opposition supporters who defied a government ban
on a campaign rally, a senior police officer said Monday.
Police made the arrests Sunday and Monday and will soon
charge the supporters of the main opposition party Civic United
Front, said Ramadhani Kinyogo, Zanzibar's head of criminal
investigations. He did not identify those arrested or say what
charges they would face.
Police shot and wounded eight people Sunday who resisted
orders not to gather at a campaign rally, Kinyogo said. The
rally was banned because of reports of impending violence,
Kinyogo said.
Opposition leaders initially said police shot and injured 19
people who tried to force their way through a roadblock to
attend the rally, but Salim Bimani, a spokesman for Civic United
Front, said Monday that only eight were hurt. He offered no
explanation for the different numbers.
Another police officer, Khamis Kheri, said Sunday that riot
police used tear gas to disperse opposition supporters who
attacked an officer with stones and then tried to overrun a
police station.
The Oct. 30 general election is only the third multiparty
election in Zanzibar's history. The last two suffered serious
flaws, according to international observers.
Zanzibar united with Tanganyika in 1964 after the violent
ouster of the Arab Sultan to form the United Republic of
Tanzania.
The elections, which are for both the Tanzanian and Zanzibari
regional presidencies and their legislatures, come as a growing
number of Zanzibaris are turning toward a stricter form of Islam
and possibly away from democracy - a source of concern for the
secular government of Tanzania.
Zanzibar, an archipelago off the Tanzanian coast, is more
than 90 percent Muslim. The ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party has
characterized the Civic United Front as an Islamic party,
something opposition leaders deny.
More than a dozen people have been killed and at least 48
injured in politically motivated violence in the last eight
months, with dozens of homes and offices set ablaze. Both sides
have accused each other of recruiting youth militias to stage
attacks.
The normally peaceful tropical islands also saw violence in
the weeks around the 1995 and 2000 elections.
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