The treason trial of Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, accused of plotting to assassinate President Robert Mugabe, reopened yesterday with an aide to Tsvangirai saying they had been taken for a ride by a Canadian political consultancy firm.

Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, gave an account of how he got to know about Dickens and Madison, a Canadian firm, which accused Tsvangirai of trying to hire it to murder Mugabe.

The firm is owned by Ari Ben Menashe, the key state witness in the case.

Ncube said Ben Menashe had introduced himself as a former Israeli spy who was on first name terms with several world leaders including the Iranian president Mohammad Khatami and former US head of state Bill Clinton.

He said he was later surprised to learn that the firm had been recently formed with only a handful of employees and no clients.

"It was in complete variance with what Ben Menashe had presented to us that his company was successful, had worldwide connections and so much influence," he told the Harare High Court.

He said Ben Menashe had claimed that he had negotiated an exit package for Mugabe with the help of Clinton but Mugabe had supposedly reneged on a promise to take up the offer.

"Ben Menashe told us that after the agreement had been sealed, President Mugabe had reneged on it and this had angered ... the US government and in particular Bill Clinton and the financial backers of the deal whom he presented as the Jewish community in the US," said Ncube.

Menashe had said that in the light of Mugabe's reneging on his alleged promise, his company had moved to support the MDC and had collected two million dollars from the Jewish community, which would be released once the MDC engaged Dickens and Madison as its political consultants in the US and Canada.

Mugabe returned to power after elections in March 2002, which international observers and Tsvangirai said had been rigged.

It has been beset by political, social and economic crises since then.

Tsvangirai has denied the consiracy charges, for which he could face the death sentence if convicted, alleging he was framed by the government in a bid to discredit him ahead of the 2002 presidential polls.

Asked to comment on Ben Menashe's evidence that the MDC had sought his assistance to assassinate Mugabe and stage a military coup, Ncube said: "That evidence is utterly false, completely and utterly false; no such request was made".

He said violence was against the party's principles.

"It's completely repugnant in every sense. We (the MDC) have always been committed to legality, democracy and constitutional and non-violent means of succeeding to power," he said.

Because of the volatile situation in the country in the run-up to the 2002 elections, Ncube said, "arranging a coup would have been extremely dangerous ... with violent and often armed war veterans very closely aligned to (ruling party) Zanu-PF".

"(A coup is) the sort of dangerous adventure which would not have been contemplated by any person. It simply would have led to chaos," he said.

The state's evidence is based on a secretly recorded black-and-white grainy and partially audible videotape of a meeting Tsvangirai attended in Montreal with Ben Menashe.

Tsvangirai said his party had engaged Ben Menashe to help promote its image and lobby the international community for funding, but realised late that it had also been hired by the Zimbabwe government to conduct its public relations.

Ncube is a University of Zimbabwe Law lecturer who joined the MDC in February 2000 after its inauguration in September 1999.

Ncube was initially also charged with treason, but the charges against him were dropped. – Sapa-AFP.