Maputo — The Brazilian lay missionary Maria Elilda dos Santos, the main source for the terrifying rumours of trafficking in children and in body parts in the northern Mozambican province of Nampula, has been exposed as a fraud in Friday's issue of the independent weekly "Savana".

Lurking behind the tales of trafficking is something much more concrete - a dispute over land. The foreign couple slandered by Elilda dos Santos, South African Gary O'Connor and his Danish wife Tania Skytte, own a farm, not for cutting up dead bodies and storing children, but for producing chickens.

But this farm is on land that was coveted by the catholic church. The 300 hectare farm used to be a state-owned agricultural company, producing milk. It collapsed many years ago, and the current Nampula authorities granted O'Connor's company, GETT, a land use title.

According to Emilio Giorgi, secretary to the bishop of Nampula, the previous governor of Nampula, Rosario Mualeia, had verbally promised the land to the catholic church.

Some time after the collapse of the state farm, nearby peasant farmers started moving onto the land. Giorgi says they presented a petition to the current governor, Abdul Razak Noormahomed, claiming that Mualeia gave them "verbal authorisation for the use of that area".

The Anti-Corruption Unit of the Attorney-General's Office even suggested that the land title given to GETT was somehow irregular because it did not take into account "the right of the communities who were occupying that area in good faith".

However, Razak told "Savana" that his office "met with community leaders to accommodate the interests of these people to those of the couple (O'Connor and Skytte)". He was convinced that "all interests could have been accommodated".

This did not happen for a very simple reason: the occupation of the land was not spontaneous at all. Instead self-styled "community leaders" helped themselves, and began renting out plots of land to peasants.

This activity was entirely illegal, and once GETT was granted rights to the land, these "community leaders" feared that their lucrative, but clandestine business would dry up. Four of the witnesses presented by Elilda dos Santos against O'Connor and Skytte just happen to be among the "community leaders" who lost money.

Dos Santos's past is not such as to inspire confidence. She belongs to a community of lay missionaries based in Sao Paulo, and came to Mozambique in 1995 to head a project funded by the Sao Paulo archdiocese in Namaita, 30 kilometres from Nampula.

People there recall her with anger, and say that if any money reached Namaita from Sao Paulo, they never knew about it.

"We couldn't move about freely, because she was always calling us thieves", Namaita residents told "Savana".

The Namaita church could no longer be used for religious ceremonies, because it had become a warehouse for the stall Elilda dos Santos ran on the main road. Here she sold bibles, soft drinks, and donated second hand clothes.

A Namaita parish monitor, named only as Calisto, told the paper that literacy classes came to an abrupt end because dos Santos threw out the teachers. And when she left, she even removed the solar panels from the house she had lived in.

"Savana" also found that in the 1990s Elilda dos Santos had a boyfriend in Nampula - and the paper even publishes a picture of the two of them on a beach. (This would be a scandal if dos Santos really was a nun: but she isn't, and has no right to use the catholic title "sister".) "Savana" found the former boyfriend, who insisted on anonymity (though his face can be seen in the photo). He is bitter towards dos Santos saying "This woman greatly harmed my life".

For the Brazilian became furious when he had an affair with another woman, resulting in the birth of a daughter. She told the then Bishop of Nampula, Manuel Vieira Pinto, that he had stolen money in order to buy a pick-up truck.

"It was a lie. I bought the truck before I knew her", said the ex-boyfriend. But the bishop didn't believe him, the case went to court, "and since the church is more powerful, my car was seized".

But Vieira Pinto seems to have changed his mind, since later he told dos Santos to go back to Brazil. (This confirms a statement in parliament by the former governor of Nampula, Alfredo Gamito, that dos Santos was thrown out of the country, not by the government, but by the ecclesiastical authorities. She only returned after Vieira Pinto had retired.) One of the claims made by dos Santos is that the GETT poultry project is a fake. Even in late February, she was saying that the project had not taken off. But "Savana" publishes a photo of O'Connor and Skytte inside a poultry pavilion, with a large number of chickens in the background.

The couple told "Savana" they had invested all their money in the project, and had tried to establish good relations with their neighbours, including the Mater Dei convent where Elilda dos Santos was staying. When their farm was invaded by peasants, the convent mother superior told them that the nuns too had faced this problem. "We don't understand the reason for these accusations", they said.

"I think it incredible that the church has been supporting the criminals who tried to sell a child to my workers. Maria Elilda insinuated that we practiced these crimes", said O'Connor.

"My workers say that in the prosecutor's office the nuns were asking them why they were helping a white man and not the Mozambicans. My workers said they weren't helping anybody, just telling the truth".

"The fact that they're using racism, using my nationality, as proof of a crime is bizarre", he added.

Yet the charges of kidnapping and trafficking in children and body parts, although they rest on no evidence, have not been dropped, and O'Connor has to report to the police every 15 days. In October the police came to their house looking for body parts. "They found nothing. They even looked inside the fridge", recalled Skytte.

On 12 November a gun-toting prosecutor, Francisco Cuamba, physically attacked Skytte in a Nampula street, and as a result of this incident the couple were arrested and spent a weekend in a police station. The bishop's secretary Emilio Giorgi defended the prosecutor's action. He had caught them red-handed in the act of kidnapping. "They had a child in the car", he said.

Indeed they did. The child in question was their own daughter, six year old Eme.

It turns out that O'Connor and Skytte are not the first foreign investors to suffer the malice of Elilda dos Santos. A Portuguese businessman, Antonio Miranda, who runs a small cashew processing plant, also came under investigation because of a denunciation made by the Brazilian.

"She said that my house in Nacala had been a prison where a child was hidden", Miranda said. "Nothing was proved, and I have nothing against the search that was made. But Elilda acted as if she was a police officer, with tape recorder in hand, arrogantly interviewing my workers".

Not all Nampula catholic priests share Giorgi's view of the case. The parish priest at Namaita, Mario Maloquiha, told the paper that Elilda dos Santos "has no credibility whatever".

An Italian priest, Giuseppe Brunelli, was even sharper.

"This is a missionary fiction", he declared. "It seems that these missionaries don't want development here".

"Savana" tried to speak to dos Santos herself, but she refused to give the paper an interview.