While Jack Straw and other ministers condemn President Mugabe’s violent crackdown, the Home Secretary is insisting that it is safe to send Zimbabwean dissidents back home.

Mr Clarke agreed last night to suspend the expulsion of Crespen Kulingi, a leading opposition figure who was due to be deported today. The decision indicates that pressure is mounting on the Home Office to stop the removals.

Hunger strikes by Zimbabwean asylum-seekers spread to more detention centres in Britain yesterday as Whitehall officials hinted at a review of the deportation policy next week.

A senior Foreign Office and Commonwealth source said: “The deportations are down to the Home Office and they must explain why they think it is a safe place to send anyone who has defied Mugabe”.

The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns said that 100 Zimbabweans are on hunger strike but the Home Office put the figure at 21.

The Zimbabwe Community Association (ZCA) told The Times that scores of failed asylum-seekers recently removed from Britain had been detained by Mr Mugabe’s secret police as soon as they arrived back in the country. Their families said that they had heard nothing from them.

Opposition leaders in Harare urged Britain to suspend the deportations as armed police demolished more homes in Zimbabwe’s major cities.

Trudy Stevenson, an oppostion MP in Harare, said: “The British Government knows full well it isn’t safe to send anyone back here.”

The United Nations says that more than 270,000 people have been made homeless in the so-called clean-up and is sending a special investigator to Harare. Mr Mugabe congratulated his police force yesterday for the operation, in which at least three children have been killed.

Refugee groups say that the Home Office is more concerned at meeting quotas to expel failed asylum-seekers than with investigating the fate of those who are expelled.

The plight of Mr Kulingi, an election organiser with the main Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition party, was first revealed by The Times this week.

Suzanne O’Connell, his lawyer, said that immigation officials will review appeals from a number of MPs but added: “I don’t think this will be a very long reprieve. He is not being allowed to stay. This is still a question of when they will bundle him on to a plane”.

Morgan Tsvangarai, the MDC leader, sent a taped message saying that his close aide would be tortured if he is returned, but the Home Office said that it had lost the cassette.

Mr Kulingi told The Times from the Campsfield House detention centre in Oxford last night that he was “relieved and happy” at the deferral, but is continuing his hunger strike in protest at plans to deport him.

The ZCA criticised Britain’s decision to send failed asylum-seekers to Malawi, where they allege that Mr Mugabe’s security agents operate. A spokesman outlined the case of Courage, a 32-year-old father of two, who was deported to Malawi last month, then picked up by agents of the Central Intelligence Organisation. Nothing has been heard of him since.

Tom McNulty, the Home Office Minister, said last night: “We categorically condemn human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and are committed to providing protection to those Zimbabweans in genuine fear of persecution. Since returns were resumed to Zimbabwe last November we have received no substantiated reports of abuse.”

But the Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, compared Mr Mugabe to the Cambodian dictator, Pol Pot. “There’s a peasantification drive here, something like Pol Pot did,” he told Channel 4 News. “They are going against the MDC which won the elections in the towns. These people are being forced to go to the country but there was a drought this year and there isn’t enough food.”

The Government ended a two-year ban on enforced removals last November after ministers argued that it was being abused by Zimbabweans. More than 15,000 sought sanctuary in the four years to 2004.

Officials say that if forced removals were suspended it could trigger a new wave of asylum applications from Zimbabwe.

Mr Mugabe’s aides accused Britain last night of training asylum-seekers as spies and pretending to deport them.

British diplomats in Africa are understood to have lobbied Whitehall to suspend the deportations before the G8 summit next month.

It appeared last night that Mr Straw was getting little support for a call for Africa’s leaders to deal with the Mugabe regime. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, said before talks with President Mbeki of South Africa that Europe must not give lessons to African governments on how to deal with Zimbabwe.

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