Harare - A Zimbabwean soldier has been sent to jail for an effective 12 years for breaking into a military armoury and stealing 20 automatic rifles, the state controlled Sunday Mail said.

It quoted police spokesperson Oliver Mandipaka as saying that Stanley Marange had been sentenced for theft and possession of dangerous weapons by a Harare magistrate on Friday.

Three other soldiers were to face a court martial, the spokesperson said. The stolen weapons were recovered at the homes of the four soldiers, he added.

Meanwhile, a 76-year-old German Jesuit priest assaulted by soldiers last week has given a detailed account of how he was punched, kicked and thrown into a muddy puddle.

Reverend Wolfgang Thamm was quoted in the independent Standard newspaper on Sunday as saying that he was on his way to collect a sick parishioner in the Banket district 80km west of Harare when he was forced to stop by soldiers at the gates of a military barracks he was passing.

"One of them took off my glasses and hit me in the right eye," said Thamm, who was wearing his clerical collar at the time. "They dragged me out of the car and pushed me into a large puddle. One of them hit me hard," and others took turns to assault him, he said.

German embassy protests

The German embassy last week lodged a diplomatic protest with the Harare government. Police denied knowledge of the attack.

Violent treatment of civilians by soldiers, police and state intelligence agents as well as torture and harassment of political activists is one of the major stumbling blocks in the implementation of a power-sharing agreement between 85-year-old President Robert Mugabe and pro-democracy leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Prime Minister Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says Mugabe has refused to carry out obligations to introduce democratic reforms, including the retraining and reorientation of the pro-Mugabe security forces since the coalition government was inaugurated in February.

Human rights agencies reported that dozens of people, including an MDC official, were rounded up soon after the weapons theft from the Harare armoury last month in a swoop that also saw heavily armed police raid an MDC residence, where nothing was found.

The agencies quoted relatives of arrested soldiers as saying that the men were severely tortured.

Major Maxwell Samudzi was reported in the state press 10 days ago as having hanged himself in a military detention barracks, but the human rights agencies said relatives had told them he had been died as a result of violent torture.

MDC driver Pascal Gwezere is also in police custody and was reportedly tortured during nearly four weeks he has been held on the same charges as the four soldiers named in the state media on Sunday.

The high court ordered Gwezere's release, but prosecutors blocked his bail on Friday when they invoked a section of Zimbabwe's law that forces an accused person to stay in jail for seven days during which the state has time to appeal against the bail.

By SAPA