The four, arrested Monday morning for publishing a paper on Saturday without a licence, are now expected to be taken to the magistrate's court this morning, according to company director Gugulethu Moyo.
The state is contemplating further accusing the paper of contempt of court for defying a Supreme Court ruling, she said.
Moyo speculated that the postponement of the hearing was an attempt to punish the owners of the country's only private daily newspaper, which Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party accuses of being an opposition mouthpiece.
"The police are detaining people not because they require time with them for any investigations, but it seems they intend to punish them before they have actually been convicted of any crime, and it's very disappointing," Moyo told reporters outside the courtroom.
"Quite clearly people are being denied access to justice," she said.
Lawyers were denied access to the detained directors yesterday.
The charges against the paper's owners - who include the paper's publisher Samuel Nkomo - follow the short-lived return to the newsstands on Saturday of the Daily News, six weeks after it was shut down by the authorities.
The reappearance of the popular newspaper followed a court ruling Friday that a state-appointed media commission had wrongly denied the paper a licence when it applied for one in September.
It ordered the paper to be licensed by November 30.
Insisting that the newspaper cannot publish until it actually has a certificate, police on Saturday shut down the paper's city offices for the second time in as many months, and briefly detained 18 staff members.
Under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) signed into law by Mugabe in March last year, just days after his disputed re-election, all publications and journalists must be licensed.
The Supreme Court had ruled in September that the Daily News - which was contesting the constitutionality of the AIPPA – was operating illegally and should register under the new law.
Moyo said that police had recorded statements from the directors and there was no need to detain them any longer.
"We are now faced with a totally corrupt justice system ... it's not justice anymore," she said.
One of the paper's directors, Washington Sansole, arrested in Zimbabwe's second largest city Bulawayo on Sunday, was released Monday on a High Court order.
The other three directors are Rachel Kupara, Michael Mattinson and Brian Mutsau.
If convicted under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Daily News directors face a maximum fine of 300 000 Zimbabwe dollars or a two-year prison sentence.
The Daily News was established in 1999 as an alternative to its main rivals - the state-run Herald and Chronicle dailies.
Several of its reporters and photographers have been arrested, including prominent former editor and founder Geoff Nyarota.
The paper's offices and printing presses have been bombed in separate but as yet unexplained circumstances in recent years. – Sapa-AFP.
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