HARARE, Zimbabwe — Police said they had cordoned off diamond digs in eastern Zimbabwe to stop profiteers, including politicians and powerful officials, from buying the stones cheaply from peasants and smuggling them out of the country, state radio reported Friday.
Checkpoints were erected to seal off the digs at Marange, 140 miles southeast of Harare, and all visitors needed official police clearance documents to enter the area, it said.
The measure was to "restore sanity" to the remote district where seams of industrial diamonds and gemstones were found close to the surface last year, provincial police chief Obert Benge told the radio.
"Senior officials who might intend to bulldoze their way into the fields will be prosecuted," Benge said.
The Marange diamond find led to a frantic rush to the district. In the past six months police arrested more than 30,000 illegal prospectors in a countrywide operation against unlicensed gold and diamond mining and smuggling. Most were fined and released.
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Last week, a top official in President Robert Mugabe's office, William Nhara, was arrested at Harare airport with a Lebanese woman for allegedly trying to smuggle diamonds out of the country.
The two were allegedly in possession of a bag of diamonds estimated at about 10,700 carats. Nhara was also accused of offering a $700 bribe to airport security men who found the diamonds in baggage.
Earlier this month the governor of the state central bank, Gideon Gono, estimated the nation lost up to $50 million a week in mining revenues through illegal smuggling of precious metals and stones.
Nhara was the first government leader arrested, but witnesses repeatedly reported other officials and foreign nationals traveling to the area and buying diamonds well below their real value from impoverished and illiterate villagers.
The diamonds were smuggled to neighboring South Africa.
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