Bomb blasts bring pre-election violence to Salisbury centre

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 9

Bomb blasts bring pre-election violence to Salisbury centre

NZPA-Reuter Salisbury Three bomb blasts have rocked the Rhodesian capital as the country’s white minority finished voting in their last election before official independence and black rule.

Two people died when a bomb exploded in their car in the black township of Harare outside Salisbury. Shortly afterwards two explosions within minutes of each other damaged a luxury city centre hotel and a church in a white suburb, slightly injuring four people. No-one has claimed responsibility for the blasts, which the police say could have been carried out by almost anj’ of the country’s opposing factions. These latest attacks in the mounting wave of pre-elec-tion violence overshadowed the results of the white poll, in which lan Smith’s Rhodesian Front won at least 17 of the 20 white seats in the new parliament. Fourteen seats were uncontested and results in the other three constituencies, all rural, will be known later. Rhodesia’s seven million blacks vote on February 2729 to choose the remaining 80 seats.

A police spokesman said that the three explosions outside the Monomatapa Hotel and in Kingsmead suburb were obviously linked.

“It is too much of a coincidence. I assume they were connected,” he said. The police could not explain why churches had been selected as targets, but said that the Monomatapa Hotel,

where several diplomats and observers in Rhodesia for this month’s independence elections are staying, might have been the real target. The Monomatapa blast was the first city-centre attack for almost a year although there have been frequent incidents in the surrounding black townships, particularly since election campaigning began in earnest in mid-December.

Five people were injured in bomb and grenade attacks in black townships around Salisbury on Wednesdaynight.

Earlier yesterday. the Rhodesian police arrested three black election candidates from Robert Mugabe’s party and said they expected to charge them with harbouring or failing to report guerrillas still at large. The British Governor (Lord Soames) banned meetings of Mr Mugabe’s supporters in parts of south-east Rhodesia. The British Governor has armed himself with sweeping powers to stamp out what he calls intimidation by Mugabe followers, including guerrillas who have failed to heed the seven-week-old cease-fire and report to Commonwealthmonitored assembly places.

Lord Soames’s latest move against the Mugabe party

was a test case to see if it would be possible to “roll back the frontiers of intimidation,” a British source said. The Governor had not chosen an area where intimidation was especially rife, preferring to see if the ban would work in a region that was only partially affected, the source said. Lord Soames has empowered himself to take stringest measures, including disenfranchising whole areas if he deems them to be so much in the grip of intimidation that free and fair elections cannot be held. He has already banned one of Mr Mugabe’s top aides. Enos Nkala, from campaigning for the February 27-29 vote for allegedly making inflammatory statements.

At a press conference after the order, Mr Nkala said he would not heed the ban and that Lord Soames “can go hang.” . Informed sources said guerrillas at a cease-fire assembly point at Magadze, 100 km north of Salisbury, opened fire with mortars and small arms when they discovered that Government troops had set up an observation post overlooking them.

There was no word of casualties.