16 October 2004	Saturday	01 Ramazan 1425

HARARE, Oct 15: The leader of Zimbabwe's main opposition party Morgan Tsvangirai, who was earlier accused of plotting to assassinate President Robert Mugabe, was on Friday acquitted of treason by the high court.

"The state has not been able to prove high treason beyond reasonable doubt," said Judge Paddington Garwe. Onlookers in the packed courtroom broke into thunderous applause as the verdict was pronounced, while a beaming Tsvangirai went over and hugged his lawyers before walking out of the courthouse hand-in-hand with his wife.

A guilty verdict could have sent Tsvangirai, whose Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party has posed the most significant challenge to Mugabe's government over the last two decades, to the gallows.

Charges of high treason were brought against Tsvangirai based on a secretly filmed meeting between the opposition chief and Canadian-based political consultant Ari Ben Menashe in 2001, in which Tsvangirai allegedly sought help to organise Mugabe's "elimination" and mount a putsch.

In pronouncing the acquittal on Friday, Garwe said the testimony of the government's star witness, Ben Menashe, was suspect and the main evidence - the grainy videotape of the meeting with Tsvangirai - did not prove that the opposition leader had asked for help to "eliminate" the country's long-time head of state. -AFP