Crowd lynches alleged murderer in Tete

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Crowd lynches alleged murderer in Tete

7:47 CAT | 28 Sep 2017

An angry crowd on Monday lynched a man whom they accused of murdering a motorbike-taxi driver and stealing his vehicle.

Other drivers of motorbike-taxis told reporters that the criminal posed as a client, but then killed the driver last Wednesday, on the road from Tete city to Cassacatiza, on the border with Zambia. He was grabbed by the crowd after they identified the motorcycle he was using as that belonging to the murdered man.

One of the taxi-drivers, Jose Saimone, told AIM “It was about 21.00 on Wednesday when the criminal rang up our colleague, known as Kabhotoro, in the Tete neighbourhood of Matundo. He had stopped work for the day, and was resting at home. His family told us that he didn’t want to go out again. But the criminal made him a good offer of payment to take him to the crossroads with the highway to the Zambian border. So he agreed to leave home and transport this client”.

When Kabhotoro failed to come home, his family tried ringing his mobile phone. When there was no answer, they went looking for him and found his body by the side of the road. They believed he had been strangled.

Saimone told AIM that last week another motorbike-taxi driver had narrowly escaped death. He picked up a client who turned out to be a thief, and who asked to be driven to a spot where accomplices were lying in wait. This taxi-driver was beaten senseless, and his bike was stolen.

“He didn’t die, but he’s not in the taxi business any more”, said Saimone. “He preferred to abandon this profession because it’s just too risky. There are many thieves who are always trying to steal our motorbikes. We are in a serious situation – on the one hand, we want to sustain our families, but on the other, we are risking our lives”.

The spokesperson for the Tete Provincial Police Command, Lurdes Ferreira, said that, as soon as the police were informed of the murder of Kabhotoro, they began operations to track down and arrest his killers. She condemned the attitude of the lynch mob.

“It is a crime for people to take justice into their own hands”, she said. “So we condemn this behaviour. We urge citizens to take alleged criminals to the nearest police station, instead of killing them”.

Source: AIM