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O País / The two men murdered in Ndlavela allegedly attacked people with machetes
Two bodies lying on the ground, a murder attended and celebrated by many, including children. This is what our news team found in Matola’s Ndlavela neighbourhood on Sunday.
The two young men were beaten to death and their bodies burned on the grounds that they belonged to a group of five ‘machete men’ spreading fear and panic within the community. The population claims that they took justice into their own hands because they were tired of the group’s conduct.
Machete attacks are recurrent in the neighbourhood. We talked to a woman who had on her face the very visible marks of violence perpetrated by the machete men. “I was coming home from work when two people surrounded me,” Aida Xavier told the Domingo newspaper. “I started to scream and one took out a ‘catana’ and cut me.” Her ordeal only ended when local residents left their homes and came to her rescue.
Eugénia Matola had also witnessed the behaviour of the machete men at close quarters when her husband was attacked last month. Although she does not remember the date, she says that fear still reigns within her family.
Station chief Gabriel Cossa confirms popular accounts of the alleged criminal activity of the neighbourhood’s Catholic men, adding that, as the authority in the neighbourhood, he duly referred the cases to the police.
None of the victims of the machete men witnessed the lynching, so they did not know if they were their attackers. However, the community says that they confessed to being machete men before they died.
Police were removing the bodies as our reporting team was leaving.
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