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By ED O'LOUGHLIN, Herald Correspondent in Harare

With armed gangs now roaming Zimbabwe with impunity, many white farmers and opposition supporters fear President Robert Mugabe has armed his paid thugs and given them a licence to kill.

Farmers were bracing for further violence by Government supporters after Mr Mugabe, aware a second farmer had been murdered only hours earlier, declared on national television that white farmers were enemies of the state.

The murder of Mr Martin Olds, 42, at Nyamandhlovu, near Bulawayo, on Tuesday brings to nine the number of farmers and opposition supporters killed by gangs of so-called liberation war veterans in recent weeks.

The opposition says many of Mr Mugabe's war veterans are youths too young to have fought in the liberation struggle and whoare little more than paid thugs.

As details of the assault on the Olds farmstead continued to emerge, Mr Mugabe, in an interview with state television on the occasion of the country's 20th anniversary, accused white farmers of being enemies of the nation for refusing to hand over their land.

Their resistance to "reform" had "exposed them as our enemies,not just political enemies, but definite enemies in wanting to reverse  our revolution and our independence", he said.

Speaking from an English-language script only minutes before, Mr Mugabe had expressed regret for the deaths of the two farmers.He then used the Shona-language part of his address to  congratulate war veterans for invading white farms.

The widening contradictions in Mr Mugabe's statements have led some observers to speculate the 76-year-old former freedom fighter is at worst developing schizoid tendencies, and at best   responding in an irrational, ad hoc way to his increasingly desperate plight.

With the Zimbabwean economy rapidly crumbling and his efforts top boost support by scapegoating whites manifestly failing, many of his actions now seem like the emotional flourishes of a gambler on the slide.

Professor John Makumbe of the University of Zimbabwe's politics department said: "He is driven by fear. Fear that he will lose forthcoming elections. Fear of the war veterans. Fear he will be moved from office."

The assault on the Olds homestead began early on Tuesday when a convoy of a dozen vehicles moved onto the farm. The occupants surrounded the house and began exchanging shots with Mr Olds,who was alone inside and armed with a hunting rifle.

Despite being wounded twice, he managed to telephone for help and to hold off his estimated 30 to 40 attackers for more than two hours before his house was set alight. It then appears he left the house and was beaten and executed.

His attackers had earlier refused to allow an ambulance to go to his aid, and neigh-bouring farmers who tried to rescue him say they were driven off by men armed with new-looking AK-47 assault rifles. A day earlier, the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU)complained that Government supporters in Matabeleland, an opposition stronghold, were being armed with weapons from government armouries.

The motive for the attack in a previously peaceful area is unknown.The Ndebele people of the Matabeleland region where the attack occurred are traditionally hostile to Mr Mugabe's mainly Shona Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU), and there have been no reports of farm invasions in the area.

There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that some of the attackers might have been Shona speakers, and that Mr Olds had recently quarrelled with a senior ZANU politician in the area.

Later on Tuesday, near Harare, "war veterans" looted and burneda white farmstead in the Enterprise Valley, and a second white farmer was abducted for several hours by squatters demanding compensation for damage caused to their huts

by angry farm workers.

With the police refusing to help beleaguered whites, the CFU has urged its members not to resist squatters, but in several case sclashes with squatters have been started by black farm workers fearing for their jobs.

That is believed to have been the cause of the abduction and murder of Mr David Stevens in Virginia Valley last weekend, the first farmer to be murdered in political violence in Zimbabwe since the end of the liberation war in1980.

Police confirmed yesterday nobody had yet been arrested forMr Stevens's murder, even though the identity of his  abductors is known to officers who allowed him and fiveother farmers to be abducted.

Survivors say the police even provided the handcuffs used to manacle them while they were beaten and robbed.

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