Harare - Senior Zimbabwean politician Roy Bennett will go on trial on November 9 for allegedly conspiring to overthrow President Robert Mugabe in a case his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says is aimed at barring him from office. Bennett's lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa said state prosecutors had agreed to postpone the trial to give the defence more time to study the state's evidence against the 52-year-old deputy agriculture minister-designate.
Bennett, a former white farmer whose lands were expropriated by Mugabe loyalists, is charged with possessing weapons with the intention to commit insurgency, sabotage, terrorism and banditry in 2006.
The trial was supposed to have started Monday but on Saturday the High Court ruled that Bennett had not been given adequate time to prepare.
His trial was initially supposed to start last week at a lower, provincial court, but on the first day of the proceedings the state sought and obtained that the case be moved to the High Court in Harare.
The move saw Bennett returned to prison for two days before being re-released on bail.
His renewed detention prompted the MDC, led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, to announce it was "disengaging" from the eight-month-old coalition government it formed with Mugabe's Zanu-PF.
