Harold was just another footsore traveller when Robert Mugabe’s thugs came for him. Spotting his Movement for Democratic Change T-shirt, they surrounded him and marched him off to “try” him before a “people’s court”, denounce him as a traitor, before beating him, stripping him, sexually abusing him and tying him up with his own shoelaces with his head forced between his legs.

Harold endured a seven-hour ordeal before he was able to escape his captors, by then drunk on cheap homemade spirit. Others were less lucky. Yesterday news of the first killings emerged in what is becoming a coordinated and escalating terror campaign against the Opposition before an expected election run-off.

Tapiwa Mubwanda, an MDC electoral agent, was stabbed to death on Saturday night by a mob of Zanu (PF) militiamen while an unnamed teacher and opposition supporter was beaten to death in Mudzi, north of Harare.

News of the fatalities came as the High Court in Harare delivered another blow to opposition hopes of an end to the crisis with its refusal to order the immediate release of results from last month’s presidential election. Alongside the refusal of Zimbabwe’s neighbours to take a strong line at their emergency weekend summit, the judgment has effectively bought time for the violence to continue. “It’s a very sad day in Zimbabwe,” said Andrew Makoni, the MDC lawyer, as he emerged defeated from the court.

Zimbabwe’s police threatened to “deal severely” with those participating in a general strike that the Opposition has called starting today, an attempt to protest peacefully about the electoral stalemate. But yesterday it looked like a militia-led crackdown was already well under way.

The Times visited eight victims of torture and beatings — including two women — taken to hospital in Harare over the past two days, hearing stories of nocturnal abductions and beatings. Most were from the areas of Mudzi and Mutoko, also north of Harare, long-time Zanu (PF) strongholds that dared for the first time to vote for the Opposition. Yet these are only a tiny handful of the confirmed reports being documented by human rights groups. “It is escalating very seriously now,” one worker said. The first confirmed killings reflect this escalation, part of a pattern in which the violence has spread from beatings in newly lost ruling party areas to torture and murder across all parts of the country.

Most victims said they were set upon late at night at their homes by mobs they identified as Zanu (PF) youth militia and veterans from the liberation bush war. Precious and her sister were asleep when 20 men and women burst through their door and started screaming at them to bring out their bags of MDC T-shirts that they had been selling around Mudzi.

Precious tried to explain that they were all gone but the mob kept beating her on the back and buttocks with large sticks until she fell to the ground. One man cracked her hand with the stick and then stamped on it, breaking a bone in her hand. “I felt that they would kill me,” she said.

Blessing, a teacher, was also asleep when the mob of 40 young men broke into his house, wielding sticks. “They shouted, ‘Where are your colleagues? We will kill you unless you tell us’,” he recalled in a shaky voice, shifting painfully in his hospital bed. The men wanted to know the names of other teachers who were MDC members. When he refused, they beat him.

Harold was simply standing by the road trying to hitch a lift, like millions of Zimbabweans who cannot afford their own transport, when a passing Zanu (PF) militia member spotted his MDC T-shirt. Harold recognised him as a local war veteran leader called Churio. “[The court] said I was a traitor and the youth militia took me off into bush to beat me,” he said. After beating him, they took his money and stripped him naked before forcing him to dig a hole and simulate sex with it. “Then they forced me to sing songs denouncing Morgan Tsvangirai [the MDC leader],” he said. After that they tied him up with his shoelaces, threaded through his hunched-up knees and painfully forced his head under them.

Victims in Mudzi and Matoko report the mobs referring to their actions as Operation Mavhoterapapi or “Operation where you put your X” — a reference to their efforts to “reeducate” MDC supporters to “vote the right way next time”.

While the militias have readily accessed lists of MDC polling agents and workers from their military backers, ordinary opposition voters are finding themselves caught up in sweeps of collective punishment of areas with high opposition scores. The posting of results on the outside of every polling station, intended to thwart rigging by allowing the Opposition to tabulate the figures with which they claim victory, is now being used to identify areas where the Opposition scored well.

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