A former Zimbabwe safari guide now living in Salt Lake City and seeking safe haven in the United States has won asylum after politically connected friends helped him appeal an initial rejection by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Cornelius van Wyk is a 56-year-old former African guide and rancher who claimed he was persecuted in his homeland when President Robert Mugabe's government took land his family had been amassing since before civil war upended white-ruled Rhodesia to establish Zimbabwe in 1980. Van Wyk, who is white, claimed in his asylum application that he survived several attempts on his life in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and South Africa and believes the Zimbabwe government wants to eliminate proof of his land ownership .

Van Wyk came to Utah on a visa he uses for annual trips to meet with hunting clients, among them former Republican state Sen. Richard Tempest. Tempest, who said he witnessed one attempt to burn van Wyk's tent on safari in Tanzania, hired an immigration lawyer to appeal his asylum rejection. He also introduced him to his friend, Rep. Mel Brown, R-Coalville, who earlier this month asked the Utah House to stand and applaud his asylum effort.

"I have very good friends," van Wyk said Wednesday after learning he could stay in the country. He added he hopes to remain in Utah and find work on a ranch.

He said he received word from an asylum officer in Houston that he had won asylum and could seek a work permit.

The government originally had ruled that he had dual citizenship in South Africa because he was born there and had lived there for three months as an infant, and that he should return there to avoid persecution in Zimbabwe.

Van Wyk argued that he would not be safe there.

The office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, sent a letter to asylum officials asking them to reconsider their initial rejection, van Wyk said. A spokesman for Hatch said the office could not confirm that because it does not comment on constituent casework.

Officials in Zimbabwe's embassy in Washington told The Salt Lake Tribune in an e-mail response to questions that they had "no information at hand indicating that Cornelius van Wyk, or for that matter any white farmer, is a target of political assassination in Zimbabwe."

"The land reform policy in Zimbabwe targeted excessive land holding by the then-white minority, [less than 1 percent of population] who held in excess of 80 percent of all farmland in the country," the embassy said in its e-mail. "Redressing the grotesque imbalance and racially skewed land ownership inherited from a racist government enhances human rights."

The embassy also noted that other white farmers continue to live in Zimbabwe.

Brown again alerted his colleagues to van Wyk's case Wednesday, reporting news of the asylum grant while on the House floor.

"It all worked out for him," Brown said, "and hopefully he'll become a tremendous good citizen for the United States of America."