Mugabe asks ANC to prevent torture probes

HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe on Friday asked South Africa's ruling African National Congress to stop probes into human rights abuses by Zimbabwean officials against activists.

The 88-year-old slammed a South African high court judgment last month that authorities in South Africa can probe and prosecute high-level crimes committed in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Mugabe charged that the court's Judge Hans Fabricius, a white South African, hankered after the apartheid regime and called him a Boer, a pejorative term for white South Africans of Dutch origin.

"That judgment by that Boer ... constitutes a direct assault on our sovereignty by shameless forces afflicted by racist nostalgia," Mugabe told a group of leaders from former regional liberation movements.

Mugabe asked the ANC to prevent investigations and "apply every means at their disposal to ensure that such machinations are not, in the end, allowed to negatively affect out cordial relations".

Two groups -- the Southern Africa Litigation Centre and the Zimbabwe Exiles Forum -- want South Africa to arrest and prosecute 17 Zimbabweans accused of torture in 2007 if they enter the country. The groups have cited South Africa's obligations to the International Criminal Court.