Mozambique: Police deactivate grenade children found

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Mozambique: Police deactivate grenade children found

9:20 CAT | 22 Oct 2021

FILE PHOTO - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Lusa]

The Mozambican police deactivated on Saturday a grenade children found in central Mozambique, a source from the corporation told Lusa on Thursday.

The device was found by children who were climbing a rock formation in Magige, Gurué district.

“The grenade was hidden in a hole,” suspecting that “someone during the civil war [from 1976 to 1992] kept it there,” Sidner Lonzo, spokesman for the Zambezia provincial command told Lusa.

The description given by the children allowed the authorities to deactivate it without causing damage.

The police dealt with another similar case in the same province earlier this year.

Children and a group of peasants were working on farmland when they found two mortars, also deactivated without damage, the spokesman explained.

Lost, unexploded explosive devices are a legacy of times of conflict.

Mozambique declared itself free of anti-personnel mines in 2015, after more than two decades of a nationwide demining programme, which at the time was one of the five most threatened in the world.

However, incidents with devices continue to happen in central Mozambique.

The most serious recent case happened in September 2020, when seven people were killed after an explosive device went off in Pebane district.

Months earlier, in March, three children were killed in a field after a mine was triggered by a hoe in Morrumbala district.

In November of the same year, one child was killed and three others escaped with injuries, victims of what was reportedly a war mine left behind in a vegetable garden in Moatize.

Other mines were detected in Namacurra district and deactivated without damage, thanks to reports from residents.

In the previous year, in 2019, in the central province of Zambezia alone, the authorities deactivated a total of seven mines, most found on land that is now next to housing.

Source: Lusa