England said on Sunday they were postponing a decision on whether to play their World Cup match against Zimbabwe in Harare on February 13.

England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief executive Tim Lamb announced the postponement at a press conference at the team's Cape Town hotel.

"Specific information the ECB has been seeking for several days regarding the safety and security of the England players and officials in regard to their visit to Zimbabwe came to light earlier today (Sunday)," Lamb said.

"This information has confirmed the concerns of the ECB that we have had regarding safety and security in Zimbabwe.

"An announcement with regard to whether the England team will travel to Harare to fulfil the fixture has, therefore, been delayed until the new information that has come to light has been formally communicated to the ICC (International Cricket Council) and their response has been received."

"This announcement will be made as soon as practicable," Lamb said.

He added the team would remain in Cape Town for at least another 24 hours pending further developments and would hold a practice session on Monday.

Neither Lamb nor ECB chairman David Morgan, who was sat alongside him, took questions from reporters citing "legal and contractual" reasons, at a conference delayed nearly seven hours from its scheduled 10.30am local time start.

Players' representative Richard Bevan, was also present. He said he had refused an offer to see a copy of the ICC-commissioned report from American security firm Kroll, which concluded that it was safe for the six World Cup matches in Zimbabwe and two in Kenya to go ahead.

But Bevan, managing director of England's Professional Cricketers' Association (PCA), said a condition of his seeing the report was that he signed a confidentiality agreement.

"I refused as I wouldn't be allowed to divulge information to the players," Bevan said.

He then added to the confusion surrounding the source of England's latest security fears by saying: "I received information from an unknown person and this stated that there were some intelligence issues that were not recorded in the document in case they got into public domain."

One of those was the 'hoax' death threat against the players, revealed earlier Sunday.

Bevan added there were four other issues but said: "I can't talk about them."

Earlier, Lamb confirmed he had received a letter on January 20 from an organisation calling itself 'The Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe'.

This made death threats against players and their families in the event that England went ahead with their match in the Zimbabwean capital.

Lamb said he had passed the letter on to the ICC, the British High Commission in Harare and to British police, who had all concluded the threat did not come from a credible source.

Meanwhile, a tournament source told AFP that copies of the same letter had also been sent to World Cup officials.

"People involved with the World Cup organising committee received this letter."

But the source added: "There is a long way between threat and risk. It's not the ones who write letters you have to worry about. People who are serious about causing trouble don't do this."

England players are reportedly angry that they only found out about the letter on Friday.

But ECB spokesman Andrew Walpole denied talk of a cover-up, saying the board had been influenced by England's experiences in Australia on their recent Ashes tour.

In Sydney a propaganda leaflet, from a group opposed to the policies of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, delivered to the players' hotel rooms was misreported by some media as a 'death threat'.

The ECB did not want to subject the players and their families to a repeat of the "hysterical" reporting in some media that followed the delivery of the Sydney letter, Walpole explained.

However, he added: "The letter addressed to Tim Lamb, did contain death threats to players and their families, we are not denying that," he told AFP.

"We have tried to deal with this in a responsible way and, although there are no guarantees, we believe the letter is probably the work of a crank."

If England boycott the match they will forfeit four World Cup points, while the ECB faces the prospect of a heavy fine for failing to honour its contractual commitments.

There are also fears Zimbabwe could retaliate by calling off a scheduled tour of England this summer, a move which could have damaging financial consequences for English cricket.

England have come under intense and sustained pressure from the British government to boycott their match in famine-threatened Zimbabwe on moral grounds because of Mugabe's alleged human rights abuses.

In January, England's players voiced "moral" concerns about the fixture as well as worries about their own safety.

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