Mob Lynches Policeman Confused With Kidnappers in Tete, Mozambique

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Mob Lynches Policeman Confused With Kidnappers in Tete, Mozambique

8:05 CAT | 29 Feb 2016

An angry crowd in the town of Moatize, in the western Mozambican province of Tete, on Thursday confused a plain clothes policeman with a kidnapper, and lynched him.

The Tete provincial police spokesperson, Luis Nudia, cited by the independent television station STV, said that two policemen had gone under cover in Moatize to investigate the kidnapping of albinos. In the past few months, there have been six kidnappings of albinos, mostly children, in Tete. It is feared that the victims are dead, murdered for their body parts thanks to a superstition, apparently imported from Tanzania, that there is something magical about albino body parts.

The police in Moatize had received reports that criminals were preparing to kidnap albino children from a local primary school. But, as he investigated the reports, one of the plain clothes policemen was accused of being a kidnapper himself.

The policeman showed his attacked his police identification card, but to no avail. He was beaten mercilessly to death.

The second policeman took refuge in the Moatize Police Command, where he asked for back-up. By then it was too late to save his colleague.

The crowd demanded that the Police Command hand over the second plain clothes officer, so that he too could be lynched. When the police refused, the mob reacted violently, erecting barricades and burning tyres along the road from Beira to Malawi and Zambia, which runs through Moatize.

Disturbances lasted for four hours until a unit of the riot police, using tear gas and rubber bullets, brought the situation under control. By the end of the clashes nobody had been arrested in connection with the murder of the policeman.

Some of the rioters, interviewed by STV, said they had been convinced that the two policemen were kidnappers. They claimed, without presenting any evidence, that “many people detained on suspicion of kidnapping are released and commit the same sort of crime again”.

Source: AIM