Watch: Prosecutors call for greater personal security – Mozambique

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Watch: Prosecutors call for greater personal security – Mozambique

7:22 CAT | 12 Apr 2017

The Mozambican Association of Public Prosecutors (AMMMP) has asked the government to step up measures of personal security for prosecutors, including providing bodyguards and protecting their homes.

According to the AMMMP chairperson, Eduardo Sumana, these protective measures could be selective, depending on how sensitive the cases handled by individual prosecutors are.

Sumana was speaking to AIM on Monday, after he had announced a programme of reflection on the security of prosecutors, as well as a tribute to prosecutor Marcelino Vilankulos, assassinated a year ago, on 11 April 2016, in front of his house in the southern city of Matola.

“We are proposed the allocation of bodyguards, for example, and security on the homes of some colleagues who are handling the most complex cases”, he said.

He recognized that there are other security measures which could be put into practice, and hoped there would be other suggestions from the government and from civil society. The AMMMP, he added, wanted to expand the debate and produce more credible proposals.

He said a tribute will be paid to Vlanculos on Tuesday, the exact anniversary of his murder. “As you know, he lost his life because of a lack of security”, said Sumana.

Three suspects were arrested in July. They were charged with first degree murder, the illegal possession of firearms, and criminal conspiracy. Two of them were also charged with money laundering.

One of the suspects, Abdul Tembe, who allegedly drove the car used by the hit squad, escaped from Maputo Central Prison on 24 October. The other two, Jose Coutinho and Amade Antonio, are still incarcerated in the cells of the Maputo City police command.

In December, the Attorney-General’s Office announced that it was charging a further three suspects, but did not give their names. It said that two of the new suspects, both men, were still at large, while the third, a woman, was under arrest.

The motive for the murder of Vilanculos is not yet known, but he was the lead prosecutor in several sensitive cases, including some of the kidnappings of businessmen that have plagued Mozambican cities since late 2011.

He was known to be investigating Danish Satar, accused of being one of those behind the kidnappings, who was deported from Italy to Maputo by Interpol in December 2015. Danish Satar is the nephew of Momad Assife Abdul Satar (“Nini”), one of the men found guilty of ordering the November 2000 assassination of the country’s top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso.

Danish Satar was released from preventive detention on 6 June, but three days later he too was kidnapped in the Maputo neighbourhood of Sommerschield. He has not been heard of since, and police suspect that this was not a genuine kidnapping at all, but merely a way of spiriting Satar out of the country.