HONG KONG, Jan 18: A British photographer said on Sunday that the wife of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe punched him repeatedly in the face after he tried to take pictures of her near a luxury hotel in Hong Kong.

Richard Jones told The Associated Press that Grace Mugabe, 43, ordered a bodyguard to hold him down and then attacked him herself on Thursday near the hotel on Hong Kong’s Kowloon peninsula.

“She directed several punches into my face,” Jones said. “She was wearing diamond-encrusted rings, which caused a lot of lacerations.”

Jones, 42, from Machen in South Wales, was on a freelance assignment for London’s The Sunday Times.

Jones said he suffered at least 10 cuts to his face but did not require hospitalisation.

“She was screaming, completely crazy,” The Sunday Times quoted a witness, Austrian tourist Werner Zapletal, as saying in a report on Sunday.

Police spokesperson Odelia Tam said police were investigating the alleged attack but had not made any arrests.

The Sunday Times condemned the attack. “We take very seriously the freedom of journalists to operate abiding by the law in Hong Kong and we look to the Hong Kong authorities to uphold those rights at all times,” said Michael Sheridan, the paper’s Far East correspondent.

Zimbabwe’s first lady was vacationing in Hong Kong and visiting her daughter Bona, who is studying in the Chinese-ruled former British colony. Grace Mugabe has left Hong Kong since the alleged attack, the report said.—AP