Mozambique: Armed attacks on buses injure seven

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Mozambique: Armed attacks on buses injure seven

8:57 CAT | 18 Sep 2020

Photo: Sala da Paz

Two armed attacks on passenger buses on Thursday injured seven people, three of them seriously in districts of Sofala, near National Road 1 (EN1), the main link in southern and northern Mozambique, witnesses and authorities told Lusa.

In the first attack, two buses from Nagi Investment and City Link carriers were “machine-gunned” along a side by an armed group early in the morning at about 7:45 a.m. local time (6:45 a.m. in Lisbon), near the bridge over the River Pungue, in the area bordering Nhamatanda and Gorongosa districts.

“We had passed a town with people selling coal when we heard shots. A shot hit a woman who was standing next to me and we all squatted, worried,”, Helena da Fraisa, a survivor travelling on the Nagi bus told Lusa.

During the attack, she told us, seven people were injured, three of them seriously, and they were given first aid at Gorongosa District Hospital and then transferred to Chimoio Provincial Hospital (HPC).

“The buses were driving close together from Beira. When they were 40 kilometres from Gorongosa we were attacked and those of us in the leading bus suffered more. There were passengers who were hit by bullets and others by shrapnel,” Lucas Xavier, another survivor, told Lusa.

The two buses had left from the city of Beira (Sofala) for the city of Quelimane (Zambezia).

In statements to Lusa, Nilma Issa, HPC’s clinical director, confirmed the entry of three victims with bullet wounds, adding that one continues to require more care.

“Three patients – two men and one woman – were admitted and are stable. But there is one who is more serious because he has an abdominal wound and the surgeons are still deciding about the patient,” Nilma Issa added.

In the second attack, another passenger bus, which was going from Beira (centre) to Maputo (south) was ambushed at about 10:00 local time by an armed group in the Save-Muxúnguè section, without causing victims.

The Sofala police, who confirmed the two attacks, said that after a contingent of the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) was sent, road traffic on those two stretches of the EN1 was restored, with a history of attacks and ambushes on vehicles in central Mozambique.

“Considering this situation, the Police in Sofala is deployed in the field to neutralize and properly hold responsible the authors of these two attacks,” said Dércio Chacate, a police spokesman in Sofala.

The attacks follow on from others on roads and in villages in the provinces of Manica and Sofala, where dissident guerrillas from the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), led by Mariano Nhongo, of the self-proclaimed Renamo Military Junta, roam.

Source: Lusa