Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Zimbabwean opposition party, was rearrested yesterday in a brutal police raid on his party headquarters as President Mugabe defied international outrage, shimmying his way into a showdown with fellow African leaders.

The 83-year-old President shuffled to the rhythm of a Tanzanian brass band after his battered-looking Air Zimbabwe aircraft touched down in Dar es Salaam, before he was whisked away in a Mercedes. In Zimbabwe police began a new wave of arrests, abductions and assaults.

Mr Mugabe’s ferocious attack against his pro-democracy opponents is an apparently calculated snub to the increasing concerns of his neighbours.

The diplomatic pressure had little effect in Zimbabwe, where Mr Mugabe’s heavily armed riot police arrested scores of members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) when police sealed off streets in the centre of Harare.

They took over the eight-storey building housing the party’s headquarters, drove out the staff and reportedly seized documents. They fired teargas at lunchtime crowds watching MDC officials being bundled into a convoy of police buses and lorries that then dispersed the captives around the city.

Alec Muchadehama, Mr Tsvangirai’s lawyer, said later that he believed that his client, who is still nursing injuries from an assault by police 17 days ago, had been released. About 20 other officials of the MDC and civic groups, including two MPs, and party executives, were seized from their homes in predawn raids by groups of up to 20 paramilitary police at a time, who also ransacked their homes. Police later claimed they had found weapons and explosives.

“The police are still not giving us access to them,” Mr Muchadehama said last night.

Mr Mugabe was last night in one-to-one talks with his host, President Kikwete, before an emergency meeting tomorrow with the 14 regional leaders who make up the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the regional economic bloc. There are growing signs of anger among Zimbabwe’s neighbours that a “failed state” in southern Africa could wreck the region’s nascent economic recovery.

The South African ruling African National Congress (ANC) distanced itself last night from Mr Mugabe, whose credentials as a hero of the liberation struggle have previously protected him from criticism.

Sue van der Merwe, the South African Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, used some of the toughest language yet when addressing a special conference on Zimbabwe in the National Assembly, an event that itself would have been blocked by the ANC majority a few years ago. “The Zimbabwean situation is a manifestation of the absence of open political dialogue, which is regrettably sinking the country into a deeper economic and political crisis from which only Zimbabweans can extricate themselves,” she told MPs.

Mr Mugabe views the agenda of today’s SADC meeting as “the campaign by the MDC to unleash violence as part of its Western-backed efforts for illegal regime change”, according to the Zimbabwean state-run press.

Mr Mugabe’s violent handling of his pro-democracy opponents in the past month has roused statements of concern from SADC leaders, for the first time in the country’s seven years of continual violent crisis. However, Western diplomats said that yesterday’s high-profile police crackdown appeared to be a deliberate show of scorn by the dictator for his neighbours.

The latest crackdown has been linked to a series of petrol bomb attacks, which police have blamed on the MDC. The party denies the charge and says that the attacks are the work of state secret police “decoy operations” to provide the Government with an excuse to crack down on the MDC.

Observers said that the use of South American-style military-type “hit squads” of heavily armed men in plainclothes for abductions and attacks on opposition figures now appeared to be an established tactic against the opposition.

At lunchtime on Tuesday, minutes after the end of a memorial service for a young activist shot dead by police on March 11, Last Maenganhamo, an MDC national executive, was in a car parked across the road from the church.

“Two unmarked Mitsubishi double-cabs drove up,” said Robert Manyengawana, who was in the car with the MDC official. “Six men jumped out, one of them with a gun, and pulled Last out of the car. He held the gun to Last’s head.”

The next they heard was a call from Mutorashanga, a small mining town 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Harare. “We found him at the hospital. He was in a terrible condition. They just beat him. They took off all his clothes and dumped him at the side of the road.” A group of unidentified armed men were reported in Mabvuku, an eastern suburb of Harare yesterday, assaulting people at random.

Tyrant’s grip

1963 Robert Mugabe formed the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu)

1964 Jailed for ten years for political activities banned by white minority rule

1974 Led the largest of the guerrilla forces in Mozambique against Ian Smith’s Government

1980 Swept to power in an election ending white rule

1982-5 Violent crushing of resistance from Ndebele

2002 Fifth reelection was tainted by violence and accusations of fraud

2007 Credited in his early years with improving black health and education, inflation is now 1.730 per cent, and more than 80 per cent of the population lives in poverty

Source: Times archives

Times Recommends

• Henning Mankell: ‘If Wallander was alive, I wouldn’t be a friend of his’
• Secret society's skull and crossbones for sale
• Nigerian leader vanishes after medical treatment