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Four weeks of post-election stalemate could end in Zimbabwe today if a recount of votes in the presidential elections is completed, electoral officials said.

George Chiweshe, chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), said: “We trust that by Monday, April 28 this process will have been concluded… leading to the announcement of the result of the presidential election.

“But I can’t say exactly when the results will be coming,” he added.

It is now a month since the country’s presidential election saw Robert Mugabe face off against Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change.

Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party has already conceded it lost control of the country’s parliament for the first time since taking power after independence from Britain in 1980. A recount of the March 29 vote in 18 out of 23 constituencies showed no change in previous results, giving a historic victory to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), officials said.

The ZEC now plans to invite Mr Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai to a final “verification and collation exercise”, where they will compare their own vote tallies with the ZEC’s own, according to the Sunday Mail, a state-run national newspaper and government mouthpiece.

The candidates were likely to dispute the figures, which would further delay the announcement of results by up to a week, according to Utoile Silaigwana, the ZEC deputy chief elections officer.

Analysts agreed that the presidential election results would be published later this week, but said that the recount was a delaying tactic aimed at securing victory for Mugabe through a campaign of violence.

“They have delayed them for too long, and, given the pressure from the international community, there is no doubt they will be announced this week,” said Lovemore Madhuku, a political analyst.

“It is very likely that they will announce that Mugabe did not get a 50 per cent majority, but will show him ahead of Tsvangirai,” Mr Madhuku said.

Takura Zhangazha, a political commentator in Harare, said: “In the event of a run-off, the strategy is to ensure that there is limited access to some rural areas through violence” by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

The opposition maintains that Mr Tsvangirai beat 84-year-old Mr Mugabe. But Zimbabwe’s main independent election monitoring body said Mr Tsvangirai had won but failed to get more than the 50 per cent majority needed to avoid a run-off.

On Saturday, the ZEC confirmed that the results of the parliamentary vote remained the same in 10 disputed constituencies, with six seats taken by the opposition and four by the Zanu-PF.

Tallies from eight more seats have not been officially released but Mr Chiweshe told reporters this weekend that there were no significant differences between the two counts, effectively confirming the opposition’s control of the main 210-seat House of Assembly.

Meanwhile, political tension was mounting as MDC lawyers launched a petition this morning for the release of more than 200 activists rounded up in a raid on the party’s offices in Harare on Friday.

Police confirmed they had detained 215 people when they raided the MDC headquarters in an operation aimed – they said – at finding suspects in a series of arson attacks in a Mugabe stronghold.

“We are going to make an urgent chamber application in the high court this morning to have all of them released,” Alec Muchadehama, an MDC lawyer, said.

“They have been overdetained while police are trying to find suitable charges against them. Some of them needed medical attention.

The opposition claim that the detainees were ordinary people seeking shelter at the MDC offices from retributive attack at the hands of war veterans and ruling party militants.

“Some among the detained were still suckling,” Mr Muchadehama said.

The police also raided the offices of the only independent election observers in Zimbabwe and took away some files, it was reported.

The MDC claim that 15 of its supporters have been killed by government troops in post-election violence.

They said that one of the victims was a five-year old boy, Brighton Mbwera, who allegedly burnt to death while asleep after his home in the northeastern district of Uzumba was set on fire by Zanu-PF supporters.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, said she was “particularly concerned about reports of threats, intimidation, abuse and violence directed against NGOs, election monitors, human rights defenders and other representatives of civil society.”

In a statement released in Geneva, she said: “If tolerance and respect for human rights continue their steep decline, the consequences will be grave for all Zimbabweans, and lead to further problems for neighbouring states.”

Today the main US envoy for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer, denounced the ongoing violence and threatened Zimbabwe with UN sanctions should the crisis continue

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