Portuguese-Mozambican citizen kidnapped in Maputo city

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Portuguese-Mozambican citizen kidnapped in Maputo city

11:12 CAT | 24 Feb 2025

File photo: Screengrab / Facebook

A Portuguese-Mozambican citizen was kidnapped on Friday by a group of four armed people in Polana Cimento, in the city of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, a source from the Mozambican National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) has told Lusa.

“The victim is a 57-year-old individual of Portuguese origin,” Hilário Lole, spokesman for Sernic in the city of Maputo, told Lusa.

According to police, the man was kidnapped at around 7:00 a.m. at the Olympic Committee compound in the upmarket Polana Cimento neighbourhood by four men with an AK47.

Surveillance camera footage circulating on social media shows the victim arriving at the location and parking his car when one of the alleged kidnappers enters the scene and questions him. Soon after, a white car also enters the parking lot, and the man who stopped the victim opens one of the doors and forces him to get in.

The Sernic spokesperson said that investigations are ongoing and that more information would be released in due course.

Contacted by Lusa, the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MNE) said it is “monitoring the case” through the embassy in Maputo.

“The Embassy in Mozambique obtained information about the kidnapping through social media and was able to determine that it involves a Portuguese-Mozambican citizen. The embassy has already contacted the family and is following the case,” added the MNE.

This is the third kidnapping to occur in Maputo this year. Since 2011, a wave of kidnappings in Mozambique has targeted mainly businesspeople and their families, many of them Asians – an ethnic group that dominates commerce in the country’s provincial capitals.

Around 150 businesspeople have been kidnapped in Mozambique in the last 12 years and hundreds have left the country out of fear, according to a July statement by the Confederation of Economic Associations of Mozambique (CTA), which argues that it is time for the government to say “enough”.

Former Attorney General Beatriz Buchili told parliament in April, 2024, that most of the kidnappings committed in Mozambique were planned outside the country, specifically in South Africa.

Mozambican police had, up to March 2024, recorded a total of 185 kidnappings, and at least
288 people have been detained on suspicion of involvement in this type of crime since 2011,
according to the latest data provided by the Ministry of the Interior.

Source: Lusa