5 December 2007
Maputo — The Mozambican police have re-arrested Luis de Jesus Tomas ("Todinho"), one of the men accused of participating in the October 2005 murder of the director of the Maputo Central Prison, Jorge Microsse.
"Todinho" was one of four men who escaped from the cells in the Maputo city police command on the night of 27 October. A saw had been smuggled into their cell, and they sawed through the bars on the cell window.
According to a report in Wednesday's issue of the weekly paper "Magazine Independente" (MI), Todinho was rearrested on 29 November in the Maputo neighbourhood of Ferroviario. Far from slipping over the border into South Africa, as had been feared, it seems that Todinho had not left Maputo in his month of freedom.
He was staying with a girlfriend in Ferroviario - but his hiding place was denounced to the police by other members of his family.
The problem for the family is that the name Todinho uses - Luis de Jesus - is not his own, but belongs to his brother. His relatives decided to turn Todinho in, for fear that the police might arrest the wrong man.
According to MI's anonymous police sources, under interrogation Todinho told the police exactly how the October escape had been organised. The police believe this information is important for disciplinary and criminal proceedings against the policemen who were supposed to be guarding the cells on the night of the escape.
Todinho also confessed to preparing an armed robbery that was to have taken place against a Maputo shop on Friday. The police ordered him to phone his three accomplices to confirm the robbery and their meeting place. This allowed the police to arrest the three men (named as Zefanias Bila, his brother Francisco, and Fulgencio Bule), one by one, on Friday morning.
Some days after the escape, MI claimed it had interviewed Todinho who was supposedly in South Africa. In this alleged interview Todinho claimed that the escapees had also wanted to free Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the country's most notorious assassin, who led the death squad that gunned down investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000.
Todinho had supposedly told MI that Anibalzinho refused to accompany the others for fear that the policemen involved in the escape intended to murder him.
But in his Thursday interrogation, Todinho flatly denied ever speaking to MI. The police, however, think that he may have given the interview, not from South Africa, but from somewhere in Maputo. MI has not revealed how it knew it was speaking to Todinho.
The three armed robbers who escaped with Todinho in October have yet to be re-arrested.
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