Where is Nini Satar? – By Paul Fauvet

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Where is Nini Satar? – By Paul Fauvet

10:35 CAT | 27 Apr 2017

File photo / Nini Satar

Mozambique’s most notorious assassin, Momad Assife Abdul Satar (“Nini”) is again on the run, following the decision by the Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) to issue an international arrest warrant in connection with the spate of kidnappings of business people in Maputo and other Mozambican cities.

The PGR may find it difficult to bring Satar to trial, however, since he left the country on parole in 2014, and has never returned.

A Maputo city judge, Aderito Malhope, released Satar on parole after serving only half his sentence of 24 years and six months for his part on ordering the assassination, in November 2000, of the country’s most prominent investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso.

After only a few months of freedom in Maputo, Satar applied for permission to leave the country for medical treatment in India, and Malhope authorized his departure. He has never returned.

The Cardoso family lawyer, Lucinda Cruz, regards this authorization as highly irregular. “Normally people on parole must stay in the country”, she told AIM on Wednesday. “He should have been kept in Mozambique”.

As for the medical treatment claim, Satar should have presented a certificate from a Mozambican doctor testifying to his condition. It is not clear that he presented any such document.

A further abuse is that Satar and the other five people convicted of the Cardoso murder were also ordered to pay compensation to the two children of Carlos Cardoso. Cruz confirms that to date nothing at all has been paid. She had heard that Satar made a promise to pay – but he has not contacted her, and to date the Cardoso family is still waiting.

Certainly Satar is not short of money. Judging from his Facebook page he travels around Europe, indulging his expensive tastes in cities such as Geneva, Paris and Monaco.

It is not hard to guess the source of this wealth. For Satar was also found guilty, in a second trial, of conspiring to steal the equivalent of 14 million US dollars from the country’s largest bank, the BCM, on the eve of its privatization in 1996. He was sentenced to 14 years for his part in this theft – but has not served a day of that sentence. The Maputo City Court should have merged the sentences for the Cardoso murder and the BCM theft into a single prison term, but did not do so.

The court ordered Satar and his co-conspirators to repay the money stolen from the BCM, but they paid nothing. Although the stolen money had to be split several ways, there could well be enough left over to fund Satar’s current lifestyle.

In addition there is the money paid as ransom to rescue the business people who were supposedly kidnapped by Satar’s associates. The PGR is convinced that it has solid evidence connecting Satar to the kidnappings. His name is on the charge sheet of two cases on the kidnappings opened earlier this year.

During the latest investigations, says the PGR statement, “it was found that the accused, Momad Assife Abdul Satar, formed a criminal organization with the purpose of kidnapping Mozambican citizens, so that later large amounts of money in ransom could be demanded”. Some of the ransoms demanded from the victims’ families run into millions of dollars.

So where is Satar now? He never went to India, saying that he changed his mind and opted for treatment in London instead. According to his Facebook page, he is living in the London Borough of Kensington. He also claims to have spent last Christmas in Paris.

Approached by AIM for confirmation of this, the British High Commissioner in Maputo, Joanna Kuenssberg, declined to comment.

If Satar really is living in London, this raises the question of what passport he is using. His supposedly frequent visits to other parts of Europe suggest that he is unlikely to be using a Mozambican passport, and may have acquired a passport of a European Union member state, possibly Portugal.

One of the photos that Satar recently posted shows him standing above a marina. A google check of marinas shows that the photograph was taken at the Marina at Barr Al Jissah in Oman. But there is no way of confirming when the photo was taken.

An alternative possibility is that all his Facebook claims about London and other European cities are just a smokescreen, and that he is living much closer to home. There are some suspicions that he is lurking just over the border, in South Africa. That would certainly explain his remarkable familiarity with the Mozambican press, which he could access more readily from Johannesburg than from London.

If he is in London, the PGR faces the problem that there is no extradition treaty between Mozambique and the United Kingdom. But this difficulty is not insuperable, according to the British government’s website on extradition, if countries without an extradition treaty want the UK to return a criminal to their jurisdiction, they must make a “request for provisional arrest”.

Hence the appropriate procedure would be for the PGR to send such a request to the British Home Office via the British High Commission in Maputo.

In any case, the police in both Europe and South Africa should now be on the lookout for him, and the PGR has circulated a photograph of Satar. But his name has not yet shown up on the list of wanted persons on the Interpol website.

Source: AIM