A hacker group ‘Anonymous Africa’, with a Twitter account dubbed “@zim4thewin”, is attempting to take down the website of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, the Zanu-PF.

At the time of writing http://www.zanupf.org.zw/ has been intermittantly working.

And according to tweets posted from @zim4thewin, it says the Zanu-PF website is being targeted on the grounds of “crimes against humanity.”

One of the tweets read, “Due to popular demand we have decided on some more fireworks. In 3 min time we will be taking down zanupf.org.zw for a short while.”

The account also tweeted the @ZANUPF_Official Twitter account, “Your website is broken. This is in response for the 20,000 Ndebele you slaughtered.”

The hacker group’s move to target Zanu-PF comes after it claimed to have knocked out South African online news website IOL.

“Please note everyone. Today #IOL will be attacked for ignoring the genocide against the Ndebele people and for supporting a dictator #Africa,” tweeted Anonymous Africa.

IOL editor Alastair Otter told enca.com, “We understand there’s a group that is calling themselves Anonymous Africa – that is claiming to attack the site and we are investigating,”

“We suspect they have flooded the servers with information, what we call requests, which means the servers get overloaded and it slows to a point where it stops working,” said Otter.

It is unclear whether Anonymous Africa is linked to other global hacker groups.

But Anonymous Africa has issued further threats to take down a website belonging to Zimbabwe' Herald newspaper.