Zimbabwe police clash with protesters in capital, teargas fired

Zimbabwean police on Wednesday clashed with a group of opposition protesters in the capital Harare, firing teargas and water canons to disperse the crowd, the latest in a series of outbreaks of disturbance against the government over the past weeks.

Hundreds of youth took part in anti-government protest organized by the country's main opposition MDC-T in the central business district of Harare.

The protesters turned violent at some points, looted a shop, and burned a vehicle.

The clash continued for hours. Some complained about the police's indiscriminate use of water against rioters and non-rioters alike.

Truck-loads of security personnel were deployed to secure the scene, near the national parliament. There is no immediate report of casualties yet.

Street protests have become a common scene in Zimbabwe since July, as the country's economic hardship deepened amid the government's drastic measures intended to buck the trend but turned out to very unpopular.

Most of the protests were aimed at calling on the government to scrap a plan to reintroduce bond notes, a surrogate currency that is to start circulating in October.

Zimbabwe dumped its currency, the Zimbabwean Dollar, in 2009 at the height of one of the world's worst hyper-inflations. Since then, a number of foreign currencies were allowed to circulate in the country, but the most widely used one has been the U.S. dollar.

Source : XINHUA