Renamo member who survived two alleged attacks under special protection of Mozambique Human Rights League

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Renamo member who survived two alleged attacks under special protection of Mozambique Human Rights League

4:02 CAT | 23 May 2016

O País (File photo) / Benedito Sabão

The transfer of a member of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) party to a private health clinic in Maputo has been overseen by representatives of international organizations, journalists and police after the Mozambique Human Rights League contacted the Attorney General’s Office and diplomatic representatives in the Mozambican capital.

According to Alice Mabota, president of the Human Rights League, armed men were looking for Benedito Sabão on Thursday night after he was admitted to hospital after being shot on 9 May in an alleged attempted execution in Manica province in central Mozambique, linking the two cases with the political violence environment that is being experienced in the country.

Mabota said Sabão became aware of intruders in the Central Hospital Orthopedics facilities and fled. Officials of the Maputo Central Hospital present at the transfer of the Renamo man declined to comment, but other patients confirmed to Lusa that armed men had entered the health unit facilities.

Lusa sought comment from the General and Provincial Command of the Maputo police, but without success, and Renamo has also failed to comment on the case.

“I do not know what they want from this poor man, but they must think he knows something very important,” Mabota observed, saying that the League had called various embassies for support and enlisted the help of Protect Defenders, an international human rights body supported by the European Union, which is paying Sabão’s expenses.

According to Mabota, Sabão was taken to a private clinic in the Mozambican capital where he is under police protection, and will soon be leave the country for his own safety until the incidents are clarified.

Mozambique has experienced a worsening of political violence in recent months, with clashes between Renamo and defence and security forces and with mutual accusations of abduction and assassination of party members, and attacks on military and civilian targets in the centre of the country attributed by the authorities to the opposition’s armed wing.

Despite Renamo’s announced willingness to resume talks with the government, the last few days have been marked by ambushes on civilian targets in the centre of the country and the assassination, attributed to the Renamo by authorities, of local administrators in Tete province.

At the end of April, 15 bodies dumped in the bush in the centre of the country were discovered by journalists. The corpses, since buried without identification by the police, were near where farmers say they have seen a mass grave with more than one hundred bodies, but so far there has been no confirmation by other witnesses.

Source: Lusa