Maputo — Mozambique's Attorney-General, Joaquim Madeira, disappointed many of his listeners on Wednesday, when his annual report to the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, contained absolutely no information on several high profile cases.

Indeed the only specific cases that Madeira dealt with in detail were the trials of the six men convicted of murdering Mozambique's top investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, and of the railway workers blamed for the country's worst train crash, in which 195 people died.

He said nothing at all about the murders in 2001 of the interim chairman of the Austral Bank, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, and of popular musician Pedro Langa. In last year's report Madeira accused police investigators in the Siba-Siba case of demanding extra payments, and "making impossible demands on the state". He also claimed that a suspect had been arrested in the Pedro Langa case. But this year he said nothing at all.

All that the public knows is that there has been no trial in either case, and that there are no signs of any serious police investigation.

Even more surprising, Madeira said nothing about the inquiry has office has been undertaking into the illicit release from the Maputo top security prison of Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"). Anibalzinho, the man who organised the death squad that murdered Cardoso, disappeared from prison on 1 September, and was tried in absentia. He was arrested in South Africa on 30 January, and extradited to Maputo the following day, arriving just hours after judge Augusto Paulino had given him a prison term of 28 years and six months.

Madeira's office has been investigating the circumstances of Anibalzinho's "escape" for the past six months, and has repeatedly promised that the findings will be released. Yet on Wednesday he did not say a word about this inquiry. Even if the inquiry is not complete yet, one might have imagined that Madeira could at least tell the parliament and the public what is holding it up.

It is widely believed that Anibalzinho could not have been released just by bribing a few guards. The question is - how far up does complicity in his release go ? To the prison management ?

To high-ranking officials in the police ? To Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje himself ? Until the results of the inquiry are known, all will remain under suspicion.

Madeira also failed to mention the state of investigations into corruption inside the Sofala and Cabo Delgado provincial governments.

He did, however, speak of the recently established anti- corruption unit in his office. Its activity, he said "has already begun to disturb some areas of the world of crime who were not previously inconvenienced: as a result one of the unit's members was recently attacked".

He was referring to an attempt on the life of Assistant Attorney-General Isabel Rupia on 18 December, which only failed because the would-be assassin's gun jammed. Rupia is the attorney heading investigations into the purchase of stolen vehicles by the Planning and Finance Directorate in Cabo Delgado, and alleged embezzlement by the former director of finance in Sofala.

Madeira declared that he was indignant, though not surprised, "at the almost total silence of our society in relation to that attack".

Only a religious body, the Inter-Faith Council of Mozambique, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is the main foreign donor to Madeira's office, had expressed their solidarity in the wake of the attempted murder. "No other official or private voice publicly condemned the attack or showed any solidarity with our institution, at a time when everybody is shouting about the need to fight corruption", said Madeira. If the intended victim had been anyone other than a prosecuting attorney, then the press "would have gone into a frenzy", said Madeira.

Picking on the press is a little unfair - for, if Madeira is correct, then the most shocking aspect of this lack of solidarity is that nobody in the government expressed any political support for Madeira and his colleagues, or offered any additional protection.