A High Court judge in Zimbabwe has ordered police to search “everywhere in their jurisdiction” for Jestina Mukoko, a respected human rights activist who was snatched from her home by up to 15 armed men at dawn last Wednesday.

Ms Mukoko's gardener, who witnessed his employer being driven away in her nightdress, said that the men produced police identity cards - raising fears that she had joined a line of pro-democracy politicians, human rights activists and lawyers targeted in a fresh wave of violent abductions by President Robert Mugabe’s hit squads.

Twenty people, including top officials of Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change, are missing without a trace after being snatched by men, usually armed, in civilian clothes and driving unmarked cars. Fifteen of the victims, one of them a two-year-old child, were seized on October 30, and the rest in the last week. Nothing has been heard of any of them since.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute today denounced the “unprecedented spate of abductions of human rights defenders” and urged African countries to pressure Mr Mugabe to take action.

Ms Mukoko was the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which has a network of monitors in every district throughout the country who have drawn up a comprehensive dossier of incidents of violence in the last eight years of political crisis - nearly all of them believed to have been perpetrated by Mr Mugabe’s security forces and militias.

In an indication of the fear Mr Mugabe's security forces arouse, it took Beatrice Mtetwa, Ms Mukoko’s lawyer, six days to find a judge who would hear her urgent application for Ms Mukoko to be produced in court. On Friday last week, four women judges in a row refused to take on the case. The order was finally made yesterday.

Since Ms Mukoko's disappearance pressure has been applied to her solicitor's legal firm. Zachariah Nkomo, the brother of Ms Mtetwa’s professional partner Harrison Nkomo, was abducted from the southern town of Masvingo on Friday.

Ms Mukoko's human rights organisation has also been targeted. On Monday morning, unmarked cars blocked off the entrance to the small road leading to her suburban Harare office, and an information officer and a driver were seized and driven off at speed.

Hopes are not high that the police will respond to the judge’s instructions to produce Ms Mukoko. Fourteen MDC activists and an infant were abducted 42 days ago in the town of Banket 60 miles (100 km) north of Harare. Thirteen days later, on November 11, a high court judge ordered police immediately to produce them in court, after seeing affidavits that identified several senior police officers among the kidnappers. The order has been ignored, police now saying they have nothing to do with the incident. Lawyers have been struggling to get a hearing for a contempt of court order against police.

Meanwhile, the abductions have continued, with Opposition activists targeted. On Monday afternoon, in full public view on a busy Harare road at rush hour, vehicles boxed in the car of Gandhi Mudzingwa, one of Mr Tsvangirai’s closest aides, threw his teenage son out and drove off at speed with Mr Mudzingwa.

The previous week, Christopher Dhlamini, the MDC’s chief security officer, was seized in Harare.

Few doubt that the abductions are part of a coordinated drive by secret police, although no clear motive is apparent. Western diplomats believe the regime may be in the process of building up a fake case of a conspiracy to overthrow Mr Mugabe.

There are also fears that some of them, particularly those missing for six weeks, may have been murdered, in a repetition of abductions carried out by state agents before the violence-ridden presidential run-off election in late June when 180 people were killed.

International human rights organisations today spoke out to highlight and decry the kidnaps. “This shows the audacity of a regime that is desperate to stay in power, no matter what the cost,” said Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International.

“The only way out of this problem is through unified pressure from outside, in particular of African leaders.”

Police have denied holding Ms Mukoko, and Zimbabwe’s information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu yesterday denied any state-sponsored abductions.

“When some people are taken by the police for investigations, then their relatives say they have been abducted,” Mr Ndlovu told reporters.

Meanwhile the United Nations today raised its estimate of the number of people who have died in Zimbabwe's accelerating cholera epidemic to 746, a jump of 25 per cent, with 15,572 suspected cases. Yesterday the UN totals stood at 589, with 13,960 infections.

A World Health Organisation spokeswoman said the latest death figure covered the period up to December 8. “The numbers are changing every day,” she added.

Yesterday the WHO said that up to 60,000 people could be infected with cholera in the worst-case scenario envisaged by its experts and other medical personnel on the spot.

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