Look: People in Pemba gather in the port on arrival of the displaced – Lusa | Mozambique

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Look: People in Pemba gather in the port on arrival of the displaced – Lusa | Mozambique

4:02 CAT | 29 Mar 2021

All photos: Lusa

Ismar Nordino, 50, lost friends and colleagues in the attack on Palma, northern Mozambique. This Monday, he is trying to find out what happened to those who left under gunfire a few days ago.

“I lost friends, colleagues. I have missing employees, I left security guards, the company, trucks, machines … I fled the gunfire in what I’m wearing,” he said, describing to Lusa his escape on Wednesday from the district headquarters, where he had a transport and logistics business.

Today, he was one of the first to leave the ship that arrived at the port of Pemba carrying people displaced by the armed attack in northern Mozambique.

He was part of a group that fled to the beach on Wednesday, looking for a boat.

“We followed the shootings on the high seas, and on the fourth day we met in Afungi,” the site of the gas projects, he relates. Now, Ismar is returning to Maputo, where his family spent days not knowing whether he was alive.

Disembarking from the ship takes place very slowly, long minutes passing before someone leaves.

A few hundred people are wait for them to disembark and for the arrival of more boats from Palma, whose population has been fleeing attacks by jihadist rebel groups since Wednesday.

Merina Simão, 29, waits in tears, for her husband, who worked for the World Food Program (WFP) and the non-governmental organization Amigo do Ambiente in Palma.

“He was going to the market,” when they last spoke on the phone, she says. “There was gunfire. And now we can’t talk to him anymore.”

“I am waiting for my family, a lot of people – my whole family is from Palma,” Assumane Gani told Lusa, eyeing the pier where the authorities had taken up station.

Dozens were waiting at the port of Pemba in the early hours of the morning, but the number quickly grew to hundreds, waiting to see family and friends.

This boat with those displaced had been anchored off Pemba Bay since late Sunday afternoon.

Ricardino Nandemo has already spoken on the phone with his younger brother, 22, who worked in a restaurant in Palma and is on the boat with “many more people”, he said.

“He was in the town during the attack, and ran away into the bush with other people. The security forces led them to safety,” he reported.