President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai will be shown preliminary results of the bitterly contested presidential election on Thursday when the process of vote checking is to begin.

State radio said today that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission had invited presidential candidates to verify the results of the presidential vote on May 1.

“All candidates who participated in the 2008 presidential election or their chief election agents are urged to attend as this exercise will pave way for the announcement of the result of the presidential election,” it said.

The move comes as supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) described a campaign of arson and violence carried out against them by Mr Mugabe’s Zanu PF party.

Chengetanai Chimunhu, a 70-year-old activist and father of four from east of Harare, said: “My house was burned down, so were all the clothes and my children spent a week sleeping in the bush.”

Precious, a 22-year-old with a six-month-old baby, who was too afraid to give her second name, said: “They torched our house, they burnt our livestock. I have nothing left and I don’t know where to start.”

Thousands of people have fled their homes since the March 29 vote and the MDC says more than 15 of its supporters have been killed by ZANU-PF militants. The ruling party denies this.

Precious, like many other opposition supporters, fled her home in northeastern Zimbabwe and took refugee in the MDC offices in the capital Harare.

She was one of more than 200 activists arrested in a police raid on the MDC offices on Friday. She and her baby were released from a police cell after two days.

The remaining detainees were released today without charge.

“They have just been released. We obtained a High Court order for their release yesterday and the police had no basis to hold them for this long. I am angry because they need not have been arrested at all,” said Alec Muchadehaman, the MDC lawyer.

The growing violence in Zimbabwe came as Mr Mugabe ruled out the possibility of forming a coalition with Mr Tsvangirai – even after the country’s ambassador to the UN said the move was unavoidable.

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