Harare, Feb 7: A recent report has revealed that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is so paranoid about his security during his foreign visits that he pays a special allowance of 5,000 dollars a day to his guards.

Mugabe, who turns 86 this month, keeps a crack team of security officials from Zimbabwe’s secret service, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), who were assigned to keep him safe during his official visit to Switzerland, Italy and Denmark.

Hong Kong - Two bodyguards protecting Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's student daughter in Hong Kong could be prosecuted for working in the city on tourist visas, officials confirmed Monday.

The two bodyguards were found to be working on tourist visas after they allegedly roughed up two photographers in June outside Bona Mugabe's Hong Kong home.

They were spared prosecution because the Department of Justice ruled that they were acting out of concern for the safety of Bona Mugabe, who studies in Hong Kong.

Rome - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Tuesday told a United Nations food summit in Rome that international sanctions are hampering his country's agricultural reforms and harming its farmers.

He also accused "our neo-colonialist enemies" of wishing to see his southern African nation dependent on food imports.

Mugabe ended his speech wih an appeal: "May Western countries please remove their illegal and inhuman sanctions on my country and its people."

Harare - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe on Saturday accused Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of being "dishonest", in what is seen as a sign of a deepening political crisis nine months after the two signed a power-sharing deal.

"We must no longer trust those who pretend to be in the inclusive government and have jumped in and out of it," Mugabe was quoted by the state-run Herald newspaper as saying.

Harare, Sep. 27 : Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe''s wife has established a giant dairy on the country’s nationalized farm-land, supplying a million litres of milk a year to Nestlé food giant.

Grace Mugabe set up Gushungo Dairy Estate in Mazowe following the ouster of the previous white owner of the farm, who was forced to sell the land to the state''s Agricultural Rural Development Authority, after facing a violent campaign under the land seizure drive.

London, Sep. 26 : Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has set up a secret farming empire out of the land seized from more than 4,000 white commercial farmers.

The disclosure about the 10,000-acre holding worth 2 million pounds is the first evidence of how Mughabe personally benefited from the land seizures drive, The Telegraph reports.

The government initiated program that began in 2000, destroyed Zimbabwe''s agriculture industry, the bedrock of the economy.

Johannesburg  - The land grabs that drove thousands of white farmers and their black workers off the land in Zimbabwe over the past decade were the "best thing could have ever have happened to an African country", according to President Robert Mugabe.

In an interview with CNN television in New York late Thursday, a defiant Mugabe, 85, defended the controversial land reform programme saying: "Zimbabwe belongs to the Zimbabweans, pure and simple."

Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will tell regional leaders at a summit in the Democratic Republic of Congo next week that Western sanctions are to blame for his country's failure to quickly emerge from an economic crisis, his spokesman said Thursday.

Johannesburg  - Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe is in hospital in Dubai, according to a report by the South African Times Wednesday.

The paper reported that Mugabe, 85, was secretly flown to the Gulf city on Sunday, where he was joined by his daughter Bona who travelled from Hong Kong.

Mugabe's office has only said that he had travelled to Dubai for private reasons. He was last seen in public last Tuesday, following his return from a visit to Namibia.

Harare - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's party Saturday demanded that Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's co-ruling Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) should be working to get Western "illegal" sanctions against Mugabe and his allies lifted.

Harare - Zimbabwe's Finance Minister and deputy leader of the former opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Tendai Biti, on Monday received a bullet and a written threat in the post at his home in Harare.

Biti, a lawyer by training and outspoken critic of President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party, confirmed receiving a brown envelope with a live 9mm round.

Harare - A medicine woman who conned President Robert Mugabe's government out of about 1 million US dollars by bamboozling ministers into believing she could tap diesel fuel from a rock, was convicted of fraud at the weekend, state media reported Monday.

Rotina Mavhunga, who goes by the alias of Nomatter Tagirira, found an abandoned fuel tank in the bush near the northern town of Chinhoyi in March 2007.

Harare - Supporters of President Robert Mugabe disrupted the first milestone event in the drafting of a new constitution on Monday, forcing riot police to drive thousands of delegates out of the conference.

Dozens of youth supporters of the elderly president, who had been bussed in to the constitutional stakeholders conference in Harare from rural areas, poured water on ministers from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party and drowned out an MDC speaker with songs.

Harare - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Saturday said the West should neither set conditions for aid to his troubled country nor question the unity of the country's coalition government.

Mugabe on Saturday told his supporters in Harare that the West had humiliated the country's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai - with whom he formed a coalition government in February - for calling for reforms before aid.

Harare  - President Robert Mugabe on Thursday appealed to international investors to come to Zimbabwe, saying laws limiting foreign ownership of businesses had not been understood.

"Foreign direct investment is most welcomed as it brings new technology, capital and new markets," Mugabe told an investment conference in the capital Harare.

The two-day event is being attended by foreign fund managers, financiers, investors and entrepreneurs from many countries such as South Africa, Ukraine, Kuwait, Britain and the United States.

Harare - The first major meeting of all key participants in Zimbabwe's nascent process to draft a new constitution, due to begin on Friday, has been delayed after demands from President Robert Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party, the head of the draft organizing committee said Thursday.

"ZANU(PF) wanted us to postpone it indefinitely," Douglas Mwonzora, head of the parliamentary select committee to produce the draft, said after a meeting with MPs. "I don't understand the strategic importance of a delay. We tried to make sense of it."

London, June 26 : A Human Rights Watch report has claimed that senior leaders in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the country’s armed forces are making millions from a diamond field where hundreds of miners were massacred last year.

The Zanu-PF rewarded the country’s military with mineral deposits to suppress illegal miners at eastern Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa Diamond deposits, the report says.

Harare - The European Union (EU) has temporarily agreed to lift a travel ban on two Zimbabwean cabinet ministers from President Robert Mugabe's party, following Mugabe's threat to call off re- engagement talks with Brussels, officials said Wednesday.

"This was a temporary visa waiver. It was a decision made after a consultation of all EU partners (in Zimbabwe) and Brussels," said Stephane Toulet, the deputy French ambassador to Zimbabwe.

Harare  - The European Union's refusal to grant visas to ministers from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's party to accompany Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to Brussels this week has deepened rifts in Harare's coalition government, it emerged Tuesday.

Tsvangirai is on a tour of the United States and several European countries to try to repair relations damaged during the past decade of Mugabe's autocratic rule and secure aid towards rebuilding Zimbabwe's battered economy.

Hong Kong  - The Hong Kong government was being pressed Monday to explain why bodyguards working for the daughter of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe were not prosecuted for an alleged assault on two newspaper photographers.

Senior legislator and barrister Margaret Ng wrote to the city's Secretary for Justice, calling reports of the assault "disturbing" and demanding a detailed explanation of the decision.