Harare - Harare's former opposition mayor Elias Mudzuri said on Monday Zimbabwean immigration officials seized his passport as he was about to board a plane for London at the weekend.
Mudzuri, who is still a top official in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was Monday making efforts to get his papers returned, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
He was pulled aside by officials at Harare International Airport just before he got onto the flight for London, where he was headed on party and private business.
"They stopped me before I got onto the plane. They just took my passport," Mudzuri said from the Harare High Court, where his lawyers have filed an urgent application for the return of the document.
The former mayor, who was sacked more than two years ago on allegations of mismanagement by President Robert Mugabe's government, becomes the fourth prominent Zimbabwean to have his passport confiscated in recent months.
Last year, Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party approved changes to the constitution allowing the government to seize passports of those deemed a threat to national security.
Passports belonging to newspaper publisher Trevor Ncube, opposition politician Paul Themba Nyathi and trade unionist Raymond Majongwe have so far been seized.
They all however had to be returned after it was found that no laws enabling the authorities to enforce the constitutional changes were yet in place.
Mudzuri, who was due to meet with MDC party structures in Britain and the US, said his lawyers were confident they could get his passport back in time for him to travel to London on Tuesday. He dismissed the episode as "the usual harassment". -
Sapa-dpa