Rosa lost her son in a wave of murders in Beira, Mozambique

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Rosa lost her son in a wave of murders in Beira, Mozambique

4:48 CAT | 08 Nov 2022

One of Rosa’s children, only 12 years old, spent the night out in the Chingussura neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Mozambican city of Beira, and when dawn came, the neighbourhood realized that he had been murdered.

“I was supposed to go identify my son. who had been killed,” Rosa Manuel says.

The child’s murder was just one of 13 recorded in the last three weeks of October, to the alarm of residents in the precarious neighbourhoods surrounding the provincial capital of Sofala, in central Mozambique.

Rosa Manuel knows nothing about the crime, only that her son’s body was found on one of the main access roads to the city, with his throat cut.

They are faceless killers with no apparent motivation, says Maria Tato, a resident of the same neighbourhood, who compares them to “terrorists”.

“If we can no longer walk on the street, this is a very complicated thing for us,” she says.

The cases shock residents, not least because of the evident violence done to the bodies. Some are shot, others – the women – victims of rape.

“We are afraid to walk” the streets at dusk, residents Rosa and Maria say, asking for a reinforcement of police patrols.

“I don’t know what’s going on, because I went to the police station to ask for reinforcements, but nothing has changed. It’s always the same story, there’s a shortage of staff,” says Joana Tembenuca, secretary of the Bairro Chingussura neighbourhood.

“One day, we were with the police and the other [neighbourhood]secretaries, stopped, at one point. Two young people came on motorcycles and, when they saw the police, they ran away,” she recounts, describing both the tension and the deterrent effect of authority.

The neighbourhood official believes that part of the solution is to reinforce police night patrols.

“We are working [on it]”, says Jorge Massingue, provincial director of the National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) in Sofala.

“We don’t know exactly” what is going on, but they are “settling scores”, and the victims are mostly prostitutes, he explains.

Massingue underlines that six people have already been detained in connection with the murders, some of them caught in possession of victims’ belongings, but investigations are still ongoing.

Source: Lusa