Mozambique: Journalists fleeing Cabo Delgado violence report seeing corpses, children alone in the woods

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: Journalists fleeing Cabo Delgado violence report seeing corpses, children alone in the woods

4:26 CAT | 20 Nov 2020

Picture: Forcom

Journalists who witnessed attacks by rebels and survived for two weeks in the forests of Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, have arrived in a place of safety, reporting that there are many abandoned bodies and children lost in the woods.

“The situation is out of control. There are many children, alone and lost in the woods,” said Beatriz João, a journalist at Rádio Comunitária São Francisco de Assis in the district of Muidumbe.

“I came across many of these children while walking kilometres to Montepuez [where she is now taking refuge]”, Beatriz João told the National Community Radio Forum (FORCOM), which released statements from the journalists, announcing that all nine who fled the station two weeks ago were safe.

But many residents did not escape, the FORCOM statement said.

The Parish Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus “is now being used as a base for the insurgents”, it said. “They [insurgents] left the previous place they were using because of the smell of the dead bodies lying in the streets,” the statement elaborated.

Moisés José, another journalist who fled into the bush, said that “the insurgents captured countless women”. “One of them was my 27-year-old daughter, who happily managed to escape into the woods and join us,” he said.

“There were many bodies in the process of decomposition,” in the bush where he was hiding, he said.

The terror in Muidumbe district started at 4:30 a.m. on 31 October.

“We started hearing shots close by,” reported Hilário Tomás, another community radio journalist.

The insurgents’ offensive started in the higher part of the district, where most of the population lived – in Ntchinga, 24 de Março, Namaculo, Nangunde, Namacande, Muatide and Muambula.

“When the insurgents realised that the communities were fleeing to the lowlands, in Miangaleua, they started to follow them and kill those they met along the way. I ran away with my family and we hid in the woods for more than 10 days,” he related.

Muidumbe was the district most recently taken by the rebels, them having occupied others for several days and still maintaining control of Mocímboa da Praia, a coastal village and one of the largest in the province, according to the recent report by a parliamentary commission.

Meanwhile, the commander-general of the Police of the Republic of Mozambique (PRM), Bernardino Rafael, said on Thursday that the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) had recovered the district headquarters of Muidumbe.

Armed violence in Cabo Delgado is causing a humanitarian crisis with about two thousand deaths and 500 thousand displaced people, without housing or food, mainly concentrated in the provincial capital, Pemba.

The province where Africa’s largest private investment for the exploitation of natural gas is moving ahead has been under attack by insurgents for three years and ,since 2019, .some of the incursions have been claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group.

Source: Lusa