Mugabe wife sues paper over Wikileaks claim of diamond deals

Thu, 16 Dec 2010

Harare - Grace Mugabe, president Robert Mugabe's 46-year-old wife, is suing the weekly Standard newspaper for 15 million US dollars for publishing a cable released by WikiLeaks claiming she was profiting tremendously from illegal diamond deals.

Raphael Khumalo, chief executive of Alpha Media Holdings which publishes the Standard, confirmed Thursday that the company had received the summons, adding "we are dealing with the matter in the usual way."

It is one of the first of thousands of leaked cables to result in legal action against the publication of the whistleblower group's controversial disclosure of official United States state department confidential and secret files.

The Standard last Sunday quoted from a Wikileaks cable written by former US ambassador to Harare, James McGee, that top officials of Mugabe's inner coterie, including Grace, were generating millions of dollars in personal income by hiring teams of diggers to hand-extract diamonds from the Chiadzwa diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe.

The area first attracted international notoriety in 2008 after Mugabe's troops drove out thousands of illegal diggers. Two hundred people were reportedly killed and thousands others injured.

Zimbabwe has since been banned by the Kimberly Process, the international watchdog on blood diamonds, over charges against the government of smuggling diamonds on to the world market. Charges that Mugabe's elite benefited from corrupt management of Chiadzwa have been repeatedly asserted by international human rights groups.

The Standard wrote that Grace Mugabe has been fingered as one of the principal beneficiaries of the illegal diamond sales, which have been described as the dirtiest.