Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has been deported from Zimbabwe a day after being detained by security officials on arrival in Harare, a UN official has said.
Nowak told reporters after arriving in South Africa that his mission had failed following his detention by security officials in Harare overnight and his deportation on Thursday morning.
"I have never been treated by any other government like this. It means that the mission has failed," Nowak said.
The Austrian academic had been invited to Zimbabwe by Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister, but when he arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Wednesday, he was told his visit had been cancelled.
The state-run Herald newspaper said Nowak had tried to "gatecrash into the country".
The order to bar him from entering apparently came from the foreign ministry, which is controlled by supporters of Tsvangirai's rival, Robert Mugabe, the president.
"When I arrived at Harare airport I was not met by officials from the ministry of foreign affairs as before, but by immigration officials who told me that there was no clearance for my entry into the country," Nowak told Al Jazeera by telephone late on Wednesday.
Nowak told Reuters: "I had not anticipated this. This is a serious diplomatic incident."
Power-sharing problems
Nowak was told in Johannesburg that his visit had been postponed due to talks between mediators from the 15-nation South African Development Community (Sadc) and leaders of the Zimbabwean power-sharing government, the UN said.
The mediators are hoping to resolve a standoff in the government between Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change and the Zanu-PF party of Mugabe.
Tsvangirai temporarily withdrew from the power-sharing cabinet earlier this month accusing Zanu-PF supporters of human rights violations.
Opposition supporters and human rights defenders have accused Mugabe loyalists of violence, harassment and carrying out arbitrary arrests.
Nowak told Al Jazeera that he did not want to cancel the mission because he was responding to an official government invitation and the team he was travelling with had already spent a lot of UN money on the trip.
"First of all when I started the mission, upon arrival for transit in Johannesburg, they told they wanted to stop me. I did postpone actually for one day ... but the prime minister of this country wants to meet me tomorrow [Thursday] at 10 o'clock in the morning," he said.
"This is not the way the United Nations should be treated."
The invitation marked the first time that Zimbabwe had offered to open up to an expert working for the UN human rights council.
PHOTO CAPTION
The United Nations' special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak (pictured in 2006) has been barred from entering Zimbabwe to meet Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
Al-Jazeera