"We are moving everywhere, including the northern suburbs and some rural areas, everywhere where there is an illegal structure, we will get there," Harare police spokesman Whisper Bondayi told AFP.

"We are targetting all illegal structures," he told AFP in an interview.

Leslie Gwindi, the spokesman for the Harare city council, said the campaign would now focus on offices violating laws for doing business in residential areas in the northern suburbs, where the city's elite - including top politicians, businessmen and sports personalities - live.

"We will be moving in to close offices in undesignated areas in the northern suburbs," he said.

"We cannot stand aside and look while people run out of accommodation when houses are being turned into offices," Bondayi was quoted by the state-owned Herald newspaper as saying.

Hordes of armed police have gone on the rampage over the past month in major towns across Zimbabwe, demolishing and torching backyard shacks and makeshift shop stalls in a campaign that has drawn global condemnation, including from the United States and churches.

The operation has so far left between 200,000 and 1.5 million people homeless, according to the United Nations and the opposition respectively.

The double-barrelled crackdown, code-named Operation Murambatsvina, which means "Get rid of trash", and referred to as "tsunami" among urban dwellers, comes against a backdrop of worsening food and fuel shortages.

Over the weekend, the Harare municipality shut down several office blocks that were considered "overcrowded, filthy and unhygienic" according to the Herald.

On Sunday, armed police used bulldozers to raze backyard structures and market stalls in the teeming township of Chitungwiza, south of Harare, where some two million people live.

An AFP correspondent witnessed a woman throwing herself to the ground, wailing "my property, my property," after police demolished her former home in Chitungwiza's Saint Mary's quarter.

Some residents rummaged through debris to salvage broken pieces of furniture while scores of families lined the streets with their belongings contemplating their next move.

"I don't even know where to go from here," 35-year-old Godfrey Chiota said, lying on a heap of mattresses by the roadside.

In other parts of Chitungwiza, police ordered residents through a loud-hailer to destroy "all illegal structures except the main house."

Truckloads of riot police patrolled Chitungwiza's streets following reports that residents in the township, an opposition bastion, intended to resist the demolitions.

Chitungwiza, situated 25 kilometres (15 miles) south-east of Harare, was created in the 1970s with a capacity for 30,000 people but its population ballooned as it became a haven for Harare's working class.

The township provided the venue for the launch nearly six years ago of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which has posed the stiffest challenge to President Robert Mugabe since he came to power in 1980 when Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain.

The demolitions in Chitungwiza came a day after police started destroying shacks in Epsworth, Harare's oldest shantytown.

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