Thirty-nine local observers of Zimbabwe's general elections have been arrested, police said as the polls entered an unscheduled second day.
They were arrested in multiple raids on Wednesday night and their computers and mobile phones were seized, police said on Thursday.
"These were coordinating the alleged release of election results by some civic organisations," police spokesman Paul Nyathi added.
Some were taken from an "election observation data centre," according to a group of human rights lawyers.
Those arrested are from two prominent civic groups - the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) and Election Resource Centre (ERC).
The two organisations conduct vote tabulations separately from the official tally overseen by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.
Candidate of opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) party Nelson Chamisa, 45, is facing off for the presidency against 80-year-old incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose ZANU-PF party has been in power since independence in 1980.
The polls have spilled into an unprecedented second day because of purported delays to print ballot papers - a problem that the CCC says is evidence of vote manipulation.
Apart from local monitors, the elections are also being monitored by international observers from the European Union, Commonwealth, African Union and the 16-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC).
