Own Correspondent|The saga around what happened to the abducted MDC trio continues to deepen with news that the car they were using was found parked at Harare Central Police Station.

Harare West MP Joanna Mamombe, 27, and two other activists from the MDC’s youth assembly – Cecilia Chimbiri, and Netsai Marova – were arrested at a police roadblock near the Harare Showgrounds while returning from an anti-government protest in the suburb of Warren Park on May 13.

Police advised Mamombe to drive her grey Mercedes to the Harare Central Police Station, where the vehicle remains parked.

Mamombe’s husband, Mfundo Mlilo, said that police – in the presence of the MDC’s lawyers – had engaged a locksmith to open the Mercedes where the three women’s phones were recovered.

The three women, speaking from their hospital beds, said they were abducted from the police station by men driving in a black Toyota Wish and driven for an hour, with bags over their heads, out of Harare into the forest. They were tortured and sexually assaulted over two nights after being forced into a pit.

They were dumped near Bindura from a moving car at dawn on Friday, two days after they went missing.

Police spokesman Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi confirmed the three women’s arrest in the hours shortly after the demonstration which was not sanctioned by police, but he recanted a day later when police could not account for the women’s whereabouts.

The mobile phones hold vital evidence about the women’s movements on the day they disappeared.

Mlilo said: “Police now have the three phones. Joana’s is an iPhone and it keeps a map of where she has been, at what time on a particular day. I’ve heard that police want to claim that the Mercedes was only parked at the station on Saturday, but the cellphone data will easily dispel that.”

There was CCTV at the main police station in Harare, fed by several cameras.

“If the CCTV is reviewed, it’s very easy to establish when the Mercedes came in, and it should also be possible to establish when this abduction vehicle arrived and left. But you get the truth from a professional police service, and I don’t think the ZRP is that at the moment,” a middle-rank police source said.