Police bury bodies with no attempt at identification – Manica, Mozambique

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Police bury bodies with no attempt at identification – Manica, Mozambique

5:43 CAT | 10 May 2016

The Mozambican police have buried the 13 bodies found scattered around the bush in Macossa district, in the central province of Manica, without any autopsies or attempt to discover their identities.

The bodies were discovered after reports circulated of a mass grave in Gorongosa district, in the neighboring province of Sofala.

The provincial and district authorities denied there was any mass grave, and dismissed the story as “disinformation”. But shortly after the denial, a Mozambican journalist who strings for the Portuguese news agency Lusa and for the Mozambican weekly “Savana” took disturbing photographs of bodies dumped in the bush. The bodies were said to be a few hundred metres from the site of the supposed mass grave.

The same bodies were filmed a couple of days later by the independent television station, STV, which counted 13 of them. Nine of the bodies were lying under a bridge over the Piro river. The other four bodies were a few metres from the bridge, near a field. This is not in Gorongosa, but just across the district and provincial boundary, in Macossa.

It is not known how long the bodies had been under the bridge. “More than 45 days” was one suggestion. Yet the STV footage showed some of the bodies still had a lot of flesh, suggesting they had not been scavenged by wild animals, which would surely have happened if they had been in the open for six weeks.

Nobody knew who these victims were, or how they had met their deaths. Antonio Muchanga, national spokesperson for the rebel movement Renamo, promptly claimed they were Renamo members who had been murdered, but offered no evidence for this claim.

Now the evidence has been buried. At a press conference in the provincial capital, Chimoio, on Monday, the Manica provincial police commander, Armando Canheze, denied that there was any mass grave in Manica, and said that on Saturday the police had collected the 13 bodies and buried them.

Canheze said that a team which included members of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), the State Security and Intelligence Service (SISE), and health officials visited Macossa to see if there was any mass grave, and ascertain how the 13 bodies had died.

“We have no mass grave in Macossa”, declared Canheze. “What our team found was the existence of 13 abandoned bodies in an advanced state of decomposition”.

Due to the state of the bodies, it was decided to bury then on the spot. With the assistance of local community leaders, an appropriate spot was identified and the burials took place on Saturday.

“We coordinated with the health sector who made plastic bags available”, Canheze said. “Because the bodies were decomposed, we carried them to an area near the place where they had been abandoned and dug the grave”.

The commander insisted that the police will continue investigating the matter, in order to clarify the circumstances of these deaths and bring those responsible to justice.

Asked if these deaths were linked to the conflict between Renamo and government forces, Canheze declined to comment. He claimed that the state of the bodies made it impossible to know whether they had been shot or beaten to death.

“We don’t want to speculate or make accusations”, he said. “The investigations are under way. After the investigations, I believe we will know who the criminals were and they will be held responsible”.

The country’s top forensic doctor, Antonio Zacarias, cited by the independent television station STV, critcised the police, for failing to seal off a crime scene, and for making no attempt to identify the victims.

Zacarias said isolating the scene would have been crucial in an attempt to discover the truth. A detailed investigation could have discovered if the 13 people had been killed at the bridge, or had been brought from elsewhere. With no autopsy, it could not even be firmly stated whether these people had died violent deaths, or had somehow perished naturally.

Source: AIM