Mozambique: Public Prosecutor’s Office accuses two journalists of violation of state secrecy

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Mozambique: Public Prosecutor’s Office accuses two journalists of violation of state secrecy

4:00 CAT | 29 Jun 2020

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

Mozambique’s Public Prosecutor’s Office [PGR] has officially named Mozambican journalists Fernando Veloso and Matias Guente as suspects [arguidos] on charges of violating state secrecy for publishing an alleged confidential agreement on security at gas project construction sites in Cabo Delgado.

Case number 85/11/P/2020 is in the preparatory instruction phase in the 7th section of the Office of the Attorney General of the City of Maputo, a source from the PGR has told Lusa.

In dispute is the publication, on 11 March, of an alleged agreement signed between the consortia extracting natural gas in the Rovuma basin and the Mozambican government on security for multinational operations.

Speaking to Lusa, Matias Guente, executive director of Canal de Moçambique, said he received the notification on 18 June and would be heard by the Public Prosecutor’s Office this week.

“This is worrying, but we are not scared. We are certain that everything was done within our powers as an information agency,” Guente said.

Canal de Moçambique editorial director Fernando Veloso, who is currently in Lisbon attending to health problems, has not yet been notified.

The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), a civil society organisation, criticised the case as an act of “persecution” on Friday.

“The allegation that ‘Canal de Moçambique’ has released a confidential document is at the very least absurd, since the media are not privy to classified information from the state,” a Centre for Democracy and Development note reads.

In 2015, Fernando Veloso was involved in a lawsuit for having printed, on ‘Canal de Moçambique’, an opinion by the academic Nuno Castel-Branco about the former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza, but he did not respond to the case because he was abroad.

In 2018, the Maputo City Judicial Court acquitted Matias Guente in a defamation suit filed by former Bank of Mozambique administrator Joana Matsombe, who alleged that she had been defamed, slandered and reviled by a caricature published in the weekly.

At the end of last year, Guente escaped an attempted abduction in Maputo, in an episode yet to be clarified and which drew criticism from several Mozambican and international entities, including the United States and the European Union.

Source: Lusa