JUST IN: One dead and four injured in bus attack in central Mozambique today

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JUST IN: One dead and four injured in bus attack in central Mozambique today

2:58 CAT | 03 Apr 2020

A new attack today on a bus, south of the Pungue River on the border between Nhamatanda and Gorongosa, has killed one person and wounded four, several witnesses have told Lusa.

“The bus was sprayed with bullets from the forest after we had crossed the bridge,” Eulalia Frederico, a passenger who survived the attack, told Lusa.

The City Link bus was travelling from Beira to Quelimane, and came under fire at around 8:00 a.m. while travelling under police escort on the Inchope-Gorongosa section of the EN1.

Pictures circulating on social media show the bus parked at the Gorongosa Rural Hospital with its windows broken and bullet holes down the right hand side.

“We’d just left Inchope, at 7:00 a.m.,” another passenger said, adding that the victims were rushed to hospital in Gorongosa.

This is the third attack in two days in a wave of armed violence that has claimed 22 lives in the area since last August.

On Thursday, a northbound bus took several shots on the driver’s side, about 08:00 (07:00 in Lisbon), shortly after passing the town of Mutindiri, with three people slightly injured, including the driver.

Half an hour later, another bus, which was on the same route, was machine-gunned and hit by several bullets in the back of the same section and two people were slightly injured.

The two vehicles and passengers had stayed overnight in the village of Muxungué and set off at 07:00 and were shot shortly after leaving the section with a military escort in the district of Chibabava near the line that separates it from the province of Manica.

The attack follows others on roads and villages in Manica and Sofala provinces, where dissident guerrillas of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), led by Mariano Nhongo, are marauding.

The group has threatened to use armed violence to negotiate better conditions for social reintegration than those agreed by their party with the government but has also refused to take responsibility for the attacks.

The area of attack has been the scene of further incursions on that section linking the North with Inchope, an important junction with the EN6 (between Beira and Zimbabwe).

Source: Lusa