Vilanculos murder: Three more charged – AIM report

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Vilanculos murder: Three more charged – AIM report

7:08 CAT | 30 Dec 2016

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The Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) has announced that it is charging a further three people in connection with the murder, on 11 April, of prominent Maputo prosecutor, Marcelino Vilanculos.

A Thursday statement from the PGR gave very few details. It said that two of the new suspects, both men, are still at large, while the third, a woman, is under arrest. Her detention was formalized on 16 December. The statement does not name any of the three, or explain their roles in the assassination, beyond stating that the three are accused of “moral and material” responsibility for the murder.

The first three suspects were detained earlier in the year, but one of them, Abdul Tembe, who allegedly drove the car used in the assassination, escaped from the Maputo top security prison on 24 October.

Subsequently nine prison staff, including the prison director, Castigo Machaieie, were detained on suspicion of colluding in the escape.

The investigations into Tembe, and the two people who were arrested with him, Amade Antonio and Jose Countinho, have been completed, and the prosecution is waiting for the Maputo Provincial Court to set a trial date.

A separate case file has been opened for the three new suspects.

Vilanculos, a man with a reputation for great integrity, was murdered outside his home in the southern city of Matola. The motive for the crime is not yet publicly 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.

Source: AIM