Maputo: Newsroom of weekly newspaper burned down – VOA

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Maputo: Newsroom of weekly newspaper burned down – VOA

7:13 CAT | 24 Aug 2020

The newsroom is located in central Maputo. . [Photo:Twitter]

Unidentified protagonists on Sunday night set fire to the newsroom of the weekly Canal de Moçambique, one of the news outlets most critical of the Maputo authorities, VOA Portugues reports.

Matias Guente, executive director at the newspaper, said that a fuel can found at the scene was presumably used to vandalise the newsroom, which, from the images circulating, seems to have lost most of its equipment.

Guente is said to have already lodged the complaint with the police.

Freedom of expression

Researchers and human rights activists have already voiced suspicions on social media that the fire was set deliberately to silence the newspaper.

Borges Nhamire, a researcher at the Centre for Public Integrity, wrote on his Facebook page that, “in this governance, everything that attacks democracy happens: activists murdered, journalists arbitrarily detained, abducted and beaten, bishops insulted, and now the newsroom of the newspaper most critical of the government torched”.

“This is barbaric. Gallons of fuel used to set the Canal de Moçambqiue on fire. Freedom of expression is under attack,” executive director of the Centre for Democracy and Development Adriano Nuvunga wrote on Twitter.

Investigative journalist Luís Nhachote turned to Facebook to say that, with this latest incident, “Mozambique has just been the scene of one of the biggest attacks on press freedom in recent times”.

And the researcher and activist Fátima Mimbire, from the Budget Monitoring Forum (FMO), also says on Facebook: “Nobody attacks a person or entity which is insignificant, useless , without its own light.”

Canal de Moçambique’s last headline reported the suspension of a fuel marking tender, which it claimed to have exposed as having been launched with an already-known winner.