Officials with Zimbabwe's opposition accused President Robert Mugabe's ruling party on Tuesday of launching a campaign of "massive violence" in remote rural areas in an effort to intimidate Mugabe's opponents ahead of a likely run-off election.

A man walks past an advertising billboard from pressure group Zimbabwe Democracy Now in Musina, South Africa, on Monday.
(Themba Hadebe/Associated Press)

The accusations came amid growing reports that often-violent groups associated with Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) were escalating their invasions of white-owned farms and driving the farmers off their land.

"There has been massive violence inside the country since the 29th," said Tendai Biti, secretary general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which has said its presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won enough votes to be declared the outright winner.

Biti said Mugabe supporters were being rearmed around the country in a move that could spark violence amid the heightened tensions of the election standoff. He urged the African Union to intervene to prevent bloodshed.

"I say to my brothers and sisters across the continent — don't wait for dead bodies in the streets of Harare," Biti said. "Intervene now."

Election officials arrested: state media

Meanwhile Tuesday, the state newspaper the Herald reported that five electoral officials in Zimbabwe were arrested and accused of undercounting votes for Mugabe and prejudicing his candidacy in the country's presidential election.

Police accused the officials of tampering with election results in four districts, allegedly giving Mugabe 4,993 votes fewer than he had earned, the paper said. The five are being charged with fraud or criminal abuse of duty as public officers.

"The suspects are currently being prosecuted through the courts in their respective areas," police chief spokesman assistant commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said.

"We are still carrying out investigations. The arrests arose from inconsistencies between figures recorded at polling centres, constituency centres and those which were forwarded to the National Command Centre."

Official results for Zimbabwe's presidential election, held March 29, have yet to be released, 10 days after the vote was held. Mugabe has already demanded a recount of the vote, which could cause a further delay of the results.

Opposition petition ruling awaited

A district court judge is expected to hold a hearing Tuesday on a petition by the MDC seeking to force Zimbabwe's electoral commission to publish results of the election immediately.

Opposition lawyer Alec Muchadehama said the court has ruled the case warrants urgent attention. A ruling on the petition, which was debated during a nearly four-hour hearing Sunday and put off until the following day, was postponed again Monday following a decision by the court that it did, in fact, have jurisdiction to consider the case.

Legislative election results released by the electoral commission last week showed Mugabe's ZANU-PF had lost control of parliament, with 109 seats going to MDC and 97 to Mugabe's party. Final results for the 60 elected seats in the Senate gave the ruling party and the opposition 30 seats each.

Early unofficial tallies suggest the MDC also took the presidential vote, though not necessarily with the 50 per cent plus one majority required to prevent a runoff.

The MDC's Tsvangirai has demanded Mugabe's resignation, and called on the international community "to remove the white-knuckle grip of Mugabe's suicidal reign and oblige him and his minions to retire," he wrote in Monday's edition of Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Land ownership issue reignites

Mugabe, 84, came to power in 1980 after a seven-year war for independence. The former anti-colonial fighter in recent days has begun inflaming the country's deep racial tensions as he readies for an expected runoff against Tsvangirai.

"This is our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites," Mugabe told mourners at a family funeral on Sunday, referring to whites by the pejorative term "mabhunu" in the local Shona language, the Herald newspaper reported. "We don't want to hear this fight is going backward."

Initial reports Tuesday suggested that two days of attacks on white farmers were slowing down, according to the Herald, as police gained control over militant elements of Mugabe's supporters — many of them local veterans of the 1970s bush war against a white-minority government — who began seizing land Sunday at the president's urging.

A spokesman for the farmer's union, however, said later Tuesday the number of invasions had grown to 60.

"The situation is escalating very rapidly," said Trevor Gifford, president of Zimbabwe's Commercial Farmer's Union, adding that many farmers were not allowed to take anything with them.

Mugabe is facing the greatest challenge to his 28-year grip on power, which has been tarnished in recent years by an economic collapse, with annual inflation rising above 100,000 per cent and unemployment at 80 per cent.

With files from the Associated Press