14 April 2005
Maputo — The Mozambican public prosecutor's office intends to draw up a provisional charge sheet against businessman Nyimpine Chissano, oldest son of former President Joaquim Chissano, in connection with the November 2000 murder of the country's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, reports Thursday's issue of the weekly paper "Zambeze".
In January 2003, six men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their part in the murder: the three members of the death squad that carried out the killing, and three businessmen who allegedly ordered it.
But during the trial, one of the business figures, loan shark Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), claimed that, although he had paid the equivalent of 46,000 US dollars to Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the leader of the death squad, he had done so at the request of Nyimpine Chissano.
The money was thus a loan to Nyimpine, Satar claimed, and the president's son repaid him with postdated cheques. Satar was able to display seven of these cheques to the court.
Nyimpine denied knowing Anibalzinho, or doing any business with Satar. He claimed the cheques were payment of a loan from a business acquaintance, Candida Cossa, and he had no idea how they ended up in Satar's hands.
A second case file was opened on the Cardoso murder in late 2002, in which Nyimpine Chissano is one of the suspects. A source in the public prosector's office told "Zambeze" that Maputo prosecutors, on the basis of their investigations so far, intend to charge Nyimpine with the murder.
In itself, this does not mean that the case will come to trial. The charge sheet and the case file must go before the Maputo City Court, and a judge will decide whether the evidence warrants a trial.
Prosecutors are not pressing charges against two other people under investigation, Candida Cossa and former industry minister Octavio Muthemba.
According to "Zambeze"'s source, the evidence going before the court includes the confessions of two members of the death squad - Carlitos Rachide, who fired the fatal shots, and Manuel "Escurinho" Fernandes, who was the look-out.
At the trial Fernandes claimed Anibalzinho told him Nyimpine Chissano had ordered the killing, and Rachide claimed he had witnessed meetings between Anibalzinho and Nyimpine. (On the witness stand, Nyimpine denied such meetings had taken place, and of Rachide he remarked "I don't know this wretched individual".) Also in the case file, according to "Zambeze", is an interrogation with Candida Cossa, in which she admitted to lying during the trial. Cossa claimed that she had come under pressure from Nyimpine and his business partner Apolinario Pateguana to confirm that she had taken the postdated cheques to Nini Satar.
That is what she told the court on 9 December 2002 - but when the prosecutors interviewed her in January 2003, she admitted this was untrue and that she knew nothing about the cheques.
As for the cheques themselves, "Zambeze"'s source noted that one of them is dated 23 November 2000, the day after the murder.
The cheque's are from Expresso Tours, a company that was owned by Nyimpine, Pateguana, and Nyimpine's brother, Naite. The paper's source said the Expresso Tours management could not show the existence of any business dealings between the company and Nini Satar that would justify these cheques. Nor could it explain why, six days after the arrest of Nini Satar (in February 2001), the two Chissanos and Pateguana were replaced as the signatories for cheques drawn on the Expresso Tours accounts held at the bank Credicoop.
Meanwhile, one of Cardoso's colleagues on the now-defunct daily newsheet "Metical", the journalist Zacarias Couto, has been interviewed again by prosecutors. According to "Zambeze", he was called as a witness by Rachide and Fernandes, to back up their stories implicating Anibalzinho in the murder.
In March, prosecutors confronted Anibalzinho (who had been tried in absentia) with the other five men convicted of the murder. Anibalzinho had escaped from the Maputo top security prison twice, once before the trial, to South Africa, and once after it, to Canada. He was deported from Canada in January this year.
Anibalzinho claimed he had nothing to do with the murder, and that he received no money, either from Satar, or from Nyimpine. He claimed he was not in the stolen Citi-Golf used in the murder, and only found out in prison that Cardoso had been murdered by his friends Manuel Fernandes and Carlitos Rachide. In response to this, Couto was once again interrogated, and reaffirmed that the mysterious clients who went regularly to the "Metical" office in the weeks prior to the assassination, buying single copies of the paper but refusing to take out a subscription, were none other than Rachide and Anibalzinho.
He confirmed that it was Anibalzinho who had once asked him "is that white guy Carlos Cardoso ?" Prior to the murder Couto had also seen Anibalzinho at the wheel of a red Citi-Golf, accompanied by Rachide.
Contacted by "Zambeze", Couto said he had simply reaffirmed all that he had told the police and prosecutors during the initial stages of the investigation into the murder.
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