Student Says He Was Detained in Zimbabwe

Arrest on Research Trip Unsubstantiated

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 11 -- A Harvard University student from the District said Wednesday that he had been arrested in Zimbabwe during a trip to research his senior thesis, then held in grimy cells for five days before his parents and local lawyers managed to free him.

Amar Bakshi, 21, a Harvard senior and a 2002 graduate of St. Albans School in Northwest, said the key to his release might have been a surreptitious cell phone call he made soon after his arrest on Dec. 30. Speaking quietly in a bathroom, he told a friend that he had been pulled off an outbound airplane by plainclothes officers.

"That was the scariest thing," Bakshi said. "A lot hinged on that phone call."

Bakshi described his ordeal in an interview at a mall near the Harvard campus. It was difficult to find immediate official corroboration: A spokeswoman said the State Department was aware of the case but was unable to provide further information because of privacy concerns. A spokesman for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences said he would confirm only that Bakshi is a student.

At the Zimbabwean Embassy in Washington, spokesman Wilbert Gwashavanhu said that he could not confirm any part of Bakshi's account. He added that he thought it implausible that a Harvard student would be jailed in Zimbabwe simply for doing research.

"I'm wondering really where the truth rests," Gwashavanhu said.

Bakshi's account of the ordeal was reported previously by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, and in Zimbabwe by the Standard, an independent weekly.

Bakshi said he had gone to Zimbabwe, a southern African nation that has spiraled into poverty and repression in recent years, on Dec. 18. It was the second of two trips he made there last year for his thesis, which concerns political propaganda and the country's youths during the past five years.

During this trip, Bakshi said, he talked to officials in the information ministry for longtime President Robert Mugabe, and collected tapes of news, arts programs and jingles designed to promote government policies on Zimbabwean television.

Bakshi said he was on a plane waiting to depart the airport in Harare, the capital, when five or six men appeared in the jetway. They took him off the plane and into a small room.

"Why are you here? What are these videotapes? You're spying on us," Bakshi recalled the officers saying. They threatened him: "You don't know how horrible this will become."

Bakshi said he made up a diversion, something like "I urgently need to go to the bathroom." Although he had been told to turn his phone off, he called his friend, who then called the U.S. Embassy.