Cabo Delgado attacks: Nyusi demands explanations from insurgents – report

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Cabo Delgado attacks: Nyusi demands explanations from insurgents – report

5:12 CAT | 13 May 2019

File photo: Folha de Maputo

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi has once again demanded an explanation from the insurgents who have been committing acts of terrorism and murdering innocent citizens in the province of Cabo Delgado in the north of Mozambique since October 2017.

President Nyusi says the insurgents cannot have any connection with the Muslims, whose dress they imitate. “There is someone commanding them. They have an objective. Let them tell us what this objective is, that they can say ‘I am a Muslim’,” Nyusi challenged during a rally in Funhalouro, Inhambane, on Friday.

The president said that many Muslims lived peacefully and in harmony with other people in communities in Mozambique, so the insurgents’ motivations could have not have Islamic foundations, and he was therefore asking them what those motivations really were.

“They camouflage themselves as Muslims, but we think this is a mask they are putting on,” the president said, describing the insurgents’ actions as terrorism, since they “arrive in villages and towns and burn houses and kill innocent people in cold blood”.

President Nyusi urged all Mozambicans to exercise greater vigilance.

“In some villages in Nangade district in Cabo Delgado, they know how many people there are, how many children there are, and when a young man disappears they go to the father and ask him, ‘We are not seeing your son here, where did he go?’ So stay organised and vigilant,” he said.

Insurgent groups have killed innocent people, sometimes removing their internal organs and cutting their bodies into pieces.

Since their inception, the attacks have killed more than a hundred people and forced thousands to flee their homes and seek shelter in safer areas. In addition to the loss of human life, the attacks have also caused enormous economic damage.

Mozambican authorities have reacted by strengthening the Defence and Security Forces in the region, to restore public order and tranquillity.

President Nyusi has been making a working visit to Inhambane, accompanied by Minister of Land, Environment and Rural Development Celso Correia and staff of the presidency and other state institutions.

Source: AIM Moçambique