More on not enough evidence to charge Bakhir Ayoob with kidnapping – AIM report

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More on not enough evidence to charge Bakhir Ayoob with kidnapping – AIM report

8:22 CAT | 09 Jan 2017

The Maputo City Attorney’s Office has declined to press any charges against Bakhir Ayoob, a man whom the police had believed was a mastermind in the wave of kidnappings of business people that hit Mozambican cities as from late 2011.

The case had in fact been dropped in 2016, when prosecutor Ana Marrengula recognised that the police investigations had produced no evidence against Ayoob, and so she would not prosecute him.

This was not enough for Ayoob’s lawyer, according to a report in Friday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”. He wrote to the Attorney-General, Beatriz Buchili, complaining that his client was the victim of “serious and groundless accusations of being a major criminal”, and now wanted his name fully cleared.

Buchili agreed that there was no evidence. The case, she noted, had stagnated in the hands of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) for five years, and no dispatch on the matter had been issued. Worse still, Ayoob had been mentioned as involved in several crimes, but had never been formally charged with anything. Now some of those case files have gone missing.

Buchili thus ordered the Maputo Attorney’s Office to close the case, and issue a dispatch shelving the matter, which it has now done.

Buchili believed that the arrest of Ayoob, and the search and confiscation of property in his Maputo home were illegal.

A warrant for Ayoob’s arrest was issued on 14 July 2012, but he left the country and was only arrested on 21 September 2012. He was held for nine days without being allowed visits from his family or his lawyer. He protested, and was interrogated, for the first and only time, by a judge, Helena Kida, who ordered him released provisionally, since she could see no reason for continuing to hold him in preventive detention.

A fresh warrant was issued for Ayoob’s arrest in February 2013 – but by that time he had left the country again, travelling first to Dubai and then to Hong Kong.

Ayoob is the son-in-law of wealthy businessman Mohamed Bashir Suleimane, whom the United States government branded as a drugs baron in 2010.

Source: AIM