I n a police crackdown, three leaders of the main Opposition party were briefly arrested to prevent a planned antigovernment protest in Dar es Salaam. Chadema Party had planned the demonstrations to protest against the alleged killing sand abductions of Opposition officials in the country, according to a new agency Reuters report.
Chadema said on X that its Chairman and former presidential candidate, Freeman Mbowe, was taken into custody as he was preparing to “lead a peaceful protest”.
Police also went to the home of the party’s deputy leader Tundu Lissu with a convoy of 11 vehicles and arrested him, according to Chadema.
Disobeying ban
Jumanne Muliro, Commander of the Dar es Salaam Special Police Zone, said 14 people, including Mbowe and Lissu, were arrested for disobeying the ban, The Guardian reported. Last week, President Samia Suluhu Hassan had advised against demonstrations and any related moves, noting that her administration would not tolerate any action that would endanger law and order. The police had declared the protests illegal, but the Opposition had vowed to defy the ban.
Meanwhile, Tanzania’s main opposition party has called for telecom firm Tigo to respond to a former employee’s accusation that the company helped the Government track the location of an opponent who was later targeted in a failed assassination attempt.
A former worker at Tigo’s parent company, Millicom, told a British court recently that Tigo had shared mobile phone data with the Government showing the location of Opposition lawmaker Tundu Lissu in the weeks before the attack.
Tracking location
Lissu’s car was sprayed with bullets in September 2017 by unknown assailants, according to court filings seen by Reuters.
“I have informed (lawyer) Bob Amsterdam to start a case against Tigo and the Government of Tanzania,” Lissu told a news conference in Dar es Salaam, adding that he does not trust local courts to handle the case. “We will force Tigo to tell us who they were communicating with. Who from the Government asked them to track me 24 hours. They have to tell us names.”
The company denied allegations in a lawsuit filed by the former employee, Michael Clifford, that Clifford had been dismissed for raising concerns about the tracking of Lissu’s location data.
