Farmers who had protested the seizure of their land were attacked by supporters of Robert Mugabe the same day he was sworn in again as Zimbabwe’s president, the head of a farmer’s union said Monday.

On Sunday, the Zimbabwean Election Commission declared Mugabe the winner of Zimbabwe’s widely condemned presidential election. His opponent, independent observers, human rights groups and foreign governments have all said that the Friday election was not free and fair.

Three farmers and a farm manager were brutally beaten in Mashonaland West, a stronghold of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, said Deon Theron, vice president of the Commercial Farmers Union. Most members of his union are white farmers. Three of those attacked Sunday had appealed to a regional body and been granted temporary permission to stay on their farms, he said.

One couple and their son-in-law were savagely attacked on their farm Sunday afternoon and then forced into a truck by a group of about 20 people, Theron said. They were kept for several hours and then thrown out of the truck after midnight.

They were hospitalized with head wounds, burns and broken bones, he said.

A farm manager was attacked nearby by another mob earlier in the day, Theron said. The manager is now in the hospital with serious injuries. A third farm in the area was also raided, but nobody was harmed.

“It’s very, very tense at the moment,” Theron said. “I think now with the president being sworn back in, they (his supporters) now think they have total immunity again.”

Mugabe claims the farm seizures begun in 2002 were to benefit poor blacks, but many of the farms went to cronies of his ruling ZANU-PF party. The seizures are blamed for the collapse of Zimbabwe’s key agriculture sector, which led to a broader economic crisis.

In a report released Monday as Mugabe attended an African Union summit in Egypt, AU observers said “the fear of violence deterred popular participation in the electoral process.” The observers also noted that the opposition was denied equal access to the media during the campaign.

The AU mission report said the “election process fell short of accepted AU standards,” but also noted that observers were encouraged that the two main parties “have shown willingness to engage in constructive dialogue as a way forward.”

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said Mugabe should have no place at the AU summit.

“Robert Mugabe is not the legitimate leader of Zimbabwe,” Tsvangirai told The Associated Press. “He is usurping the power of the people. He has brutalized his own people.”

“The crisis that he has caused in this country is now the responsibility of the AU and SADC.”

In its final statement, the Southern African Development Community team of election observers shied away from calling the elections not free and fair, instead saying that the results did not express the will of the Zimbabwean people. The SADC observer report said that its mission took place under “unprecedented levels of violence and political intolerance, followed by extreme statements from the country’s principal political figures.”

The report also recommended a regional mediation mechanism to facilitate talks between the two main parties.

Although the AU and SADC have issued diplomatic comments on the election, the leader of the Pan-African Parliament election observer mission has criticized the election outright.

Marwick Khumalo, a member of parliament from Swaziland who led the Pan-African Parliament team said on Sunday that “the current atmosphere prevailing in the country did not give rise to the conduct of free, fair and credible elections.”