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Mozambique: Trial in Albano Silva Attempted Murder Case Set for April
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
16 January 2008
Posted to the web 16 January 2008
Maputo
Judge Dimas Marroa, of the 10th section of the Maputo City Court, has set 21 April as the date for the start of the trial of seven men accused of the attempted murder of prominent lawyer Albano Silva.
The attempt on Silva's life took place on 29 November 1999. He was driving along one of Maputo's main thoroughfares, when the assassins' car drew up alongside. In broad daylight, a pistol was fired through Silva's open window, but the bullet missed his head by a few millimeters.
The men accused of ordering the killing are the notorious loan shark, Momad Assife Abdul Satar (better known as "Nini"), and his brother Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the now defunct foreign exchange bureau Unicambios. Both Satar brothers are already serving lengthy prison sentences for their part in the murder, in November 2000, of the country's foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso.
Silva was the lawyer for the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM), which had been defrauded of the equivalent of 14 million US dollars in 1996 by members of the Abdul Satar family, and their accomplice, BCM branch manager Vicente Ramaya.
The prosecution case is that Silva's relentless pursuit of the BCM case earned him the bitter hostility of the Abdul Satar brothers. Nini Satar decided that Albano Silva should be eliminated and hired a shady businessman named Fernando Magno to arrange the assassination. Satar is alleged to have paid Magno 40,000 South African rands (about 6,800 US dollars at current exchange rates).
Magno recruited two other underworld figures to join the death squad - the car thief Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), and his friend Manuel Fernandes. The three of them were in the car that pursued Silva on 29 November 1999.
There is some doubt as to whether they deliberately failed in their mission (on the grounds that Satar had not paid them enough). The prosecution argues that, after the failed attempt, Nini Satar cut out the middleman, Fernando Magno, and negotiated directly with Anibalzinho.
Anibalzinho's price for the murder was a billion old meticais (equivalent to a million new meticais, which is worth about 41,600 dollars at today's exchange rates). Satar contacted Anibalzinho via Osvaldo Muianga ("Dudu") whose prominent role in planning the second murder attempt means that he too is among the accused, despite later giving evidence against Anibalzinho.
Satar paid Anibalzinho 100 million old meticais in two instalments (one of 80 million and one of 20 million) to start preparing the murder. The money was given to Anibalzinho on the Unicambios premises.
As part of the preparations, Anibalzinho hired a former state security agent and one-time employee of Nini Satar, Paulo Estevao Daniel ("Dangerman") to spy on Silva's house and follow his movements. But Daniel seems to have been a very poor spy - he was identified as the driver of the car following Silva around, and was arrested on 9 June 2000. A judge released Daniel shortly afterwards - largely because of extraordinarily shoddy work by the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) who did not reveal to the magistrate the statements made by Silva against Daniel, or the pattern of regular contact between Daniel and Satar.
But in mid-2000 the plot against Silva was suspended, and the Satars switched their attention to the man they called "the second inconvenience", Carlos Cardoso.
Cardoso had published the names of those who defrauded the BCM in the daily newssheet he edited, "Metical", and consistently demanded that the BCM case be taken all the way to trial. The major obstacle to this was that some prosecutors were on the Abdul Satar payroll. Organised crime had infiltrated the Attorney-General's Office, which was taking no measures to ensure a solution to the BCM case.
But the shield of impunity that the fraudsters enjoyed fell away when, in July 2000, thanks in large measure to the work of Silva and Cardoso, President Joaquim Chissano sacked Attorney-General Antonio Namburete and all six assistant attorney-generals.
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Cardoso and Silva had been largely responsible for bringing down the corrupt structure of the Attorney-General's office, which had protected the BCM fraudsters for the previous four years. The Abdul Satar crime family would never forgive Cardoso for this, and their hired guns cut short his life on 22 November 2000.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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