Mozambique: Organisation calls for a second case on murder of electoral observer

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Mozambique: Organisation calls for a second case on murder of electoral observer

7:59 CAT | 27 May 2020

File photo: CDD Moçambique

The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), a Mozambican civil society organisation, proposed opening a second case to prosecute the murder of electoral observer Anastácio Matavel last October.

In a statement issued on Monday, the organisation anticipates only disappointment from the Gaza Province Judicial Court, where six policemen and a civilian are on trial.

“Aware that these and other issues will not be clarified in the present trial, the CDD demands that the justice authorities deepen the investigations by opening autonomous cases to identify and hold accountable the moral perpetrators of this crime,” the document reads.

“This conclusion stems from the CDD’s observations of the hearings and trial sessions, and is based on the omissions and gaps in the investigation itself,” it adds, reaffirming the organisation’s lack of confidence from even before the start of the trial itself.

The CDD notes that all the Special Operations Group (GOE) police officers place responsibility for the murder on the platoon fugitive commander, Agapito Matavel, and considers as insufficient the explanations as to the involvement of other figures such as Henriques Machava, a senior member of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) in Gaza and president of Chibuto Municipal Council, whose vehicle was used in the commission of the crime.

Even so, the organization expresses “satisfaction” at the trial as “the first” among several involving “egregious cases of human rights violations” although critical voices are silenced without establishing “at the very least, their [the crime’s] material authors”.

“For example, the murder cases of constitutional lawyer and professor Gilles Cistac, and the abductions of academic and university professor Jaime Macuane and journalist and analyst Ericino de Salema.”

The organisation is paying for lawyers for Anastácio Matavel’s family in the lawsuit and has also supported the transport of journalists to Xai-Xai, the provincial capital of Gaza, about 200 kilometres north of Maputo, to cover the trial, whose final deliberations are scheduled for Thursday.

The CDD alleges that Matavel’s murder was a state crime by policemen on a mission, and condemns the Public Prosecutor’s Office for excluding such a possibility by maintaining that the defendants committed the crime in their own names and in their own interest.

Anastácio Matavel, a leader of the Casa da Paz election observation group, was shot and killed a week before the October 15 general elections. The murder of the civil society activist during an election campaign provoked widespread revulsion and condemnation in Mozambique and abroad.

Source: Lusa