Renamo member shot in Tete – Mozambique Elections, AIM report

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Renamo member shot in Tete – Mozambique Elections, AIM report

3:01 CAT | 29 Sep 2018

Renamo's candidate in Tete Ricardo Tomas visiting Aly Moomad in hospital.Photo: Ricardo Tomas / Facebook

A violent incident shook the municipal election campaign in the western Mozambican city of Tete on Thursday, when a member of the main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, was shot in the left thigh.

The shooting took place outside a Tete police station, but the victim, 49 year old Aly Momad Vanhane, said he had no doubt that he was shot, not by a policeman, but by a local official of the ruling Frelimo Party.

Vanhane had gone to the police station to complain of the destruction of Renamo election propaganda by Frelimo members. He said the Frelimo posters were stuck over Renamo ones on the wall of a office in the Mpadue neighbourhood.

Renamo members tried to replace their posters, and the Frelimo group then called for police assistance. The police took Vanhane’s group and the Frelimo accuser to a nearby police station.

“We found the Frelimo first secretary from Mpadue neighbourhood flyposting Frelimo posters on top of Renamo ones”, Vanhane told reporters. “I and my colleagues went to the police, but when we were leaving the same member of Frelimo tried to attack us with his fists. But when he saw that I was escaping, he fired two shots, and one of them hit me in the thigh”.

The clinical director of Tete Provincial Hospital, Mauro Monteiro, said that Vanhane was out of danger. “We are observing him to see whether the bullet lodged in his body or not”, he said. “His life is not in danger, because we have stopped the bleeding”.

In a second incident, a few hours earlier, Renamo members said a Frelimo group had tried to put their own propaganda on the walls of the main Renamo delegation in Tete. One of the guards on the Renamo office told a press conference: “We came across a group of youths when they wanted to put the posters of their party on top of ours. When we stopped them, they began to attack me and my colleague”.

But Ana Rita Sithole, deputy chief of the Frelimo central brigade for Tete, simply denied that any of this had happened. She told the independent television station STV that Frelimo members respect the law, and that Frelimo militants have been instructed to behave in a courteous manner during the campaign.

Yet there is undoubtedly an injured Renamo member under medical care in Tete Provincial Hospital. Sithole had no explanation for what had happened to him.

The Tete provincial police spokesperson, Lurdes Ferreira, declined to comment on the case, but promised she would do so once she had sufficient information.

Source: AIM