Police refuse to confirm identity of murdered criminals – AIM report

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Police refuse to confirm identity of murdered criminals – AIM report

6:20 CAT | 08 May 2017

File photo / PRM spokesman Orlando Mudumane

The Maputo City Police command has refused to confirm that the two bodies found in a shallow grave in Moamba district last Friday are those of Jose Aly Coutinho and Alfredo Muchanga, two convicted prisoners who were seized from police custody on 24 April.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, the spokesperson for the City Command, Orlando Mudumane, continued to describe the two men as “fugitives”, even though their bodies were identified by their families at the morgue in Maputo Central Hospital on Friday, and one of them, Coutinho, was buried on Saturday.

Although the morgue is just a couple of minutes walking distance from the city command, Mudumane claimed that the press was the only source for the discovery and identification of the bodies.

Journalists from the independent television station STV visited the grave in Moamba on Friday, and showed the people who had discovered it a photo of Coutinho. They identified him as one of the bodies they had exhumed.

This, plus the positive identification by the families, leaves no reasonable doubt that the bodies were indeed those of Coutinho and Muchanga. Yet Mudumane said the police are still working to recapture the two men and take them back to their prison cells.

“The official information is that they are fugitives”, he insisted. But if it was indeed the case that they had been murdered, “the police will work intensively to identify those responsible for this act which, if it is true, is very macabre”.

Mudumane could start by looking at those of his colleagues in the city command who allowed Coutinho and Muchanga to leave their cells on the morning of 24 April, supposedly to be interrogated at a police station about their attempts to sabotage the security system on their cells.

This was highly irregular: normal procedure for convicted criminals would be for the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) to interrogate them in the prison, and not drive them across the city. Furthermore, the escort that was accompanying the police vehicle carrying the two men stopped at a red traffic light – but normally police cars accompanying criminals do not stop at traffic lights. They just turn their sirens on and drive through.

When the car carrying Coutinho and Muchanga was ambushed by four hooded gunmen the two police guards made no attempt to defend their prisoners, but fled.

At the time it was assumed that fellow criminals had made a daring rescue, springing Coutinho and Muchanga from custody. Now it is clear that they were seized in order to be executed and thus silenced.

Coutinho was suspected of involvement in the murder last year of senior Maputo prosecutor Marcelino Vilanculos, who was gunned down outside his home in Matola city on 11 April 2016. Vilanculos was handling a number of high profile, sensitive cases, including the wave of kidnappings of business people of Asian origin.

Source: AIM