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Mozambique: Albano Silva Case - Dangerman Denies All
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
28 April 2008
Posted to the web 28 April 2008
Maputo
Security guard Paulo Estevao ("Dangerman") on Monday told the Maputo City Court that he had no part in the attempts on the life of lawyer Albano Silva in 1999 and 2000.
The prosecution alleges that, after the first attempt to eliminate Silva failed, in November 1999, the plotters used Dangerman to spy on Silva's home and his movements in preparation for a second attempt.
Those accused of plotting the murder, Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") and his brother Ayob, supposedly wished to remove Silva because he was the lawyer for the BCM, the bank which members of the Abdul Satar family had defrauded of the equivalent of 14 million US dollars. Silva was determined to bring the case to trial and was remorselessly pursuing the fraudsters.
Dangerman told the court he was a good friend of Nini Satar. After leaving the army, he went into the private security business, and became head of security for two of the Abdul Satar family businesses, the fashion shop Unimodas, and the foreign exchange bureau Unicambios.
At the same time he was a bodyguard for Gerry Roper, manager of the Polana Hotel Casino. He admitted to driving a white Citi-Golf, rented by the Casino. This was the car that had supposedly been used to spy on Silva.
Dangerman categorically denied driving around Silva's house, or asking Silva's domestic servant if he lived there. "I didn't know, and I still don't know, where Albano Silva lives", he said.
Some time after his second arrest in 2001, Dangerman's lawyer, Salvador Bazima, spotted Silva outside the Maputo city court. At Dangerman's request, Bazima called Silva over to speak to him. There are two diametrically opposed accounts of this meeting.
Silva's own recollection, which he deposited in the court record, was that Dangerman said he wanted to make "revelations" about the murder, and about the assassination, a year later, of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso. According to Silva, "I told him I was not interested in anything outside the court". Nonetheless, Dangerman told Silva he had indeed driven the car spying on him, but had done so on Nini Satar's instructions.
Dangerman's version of this encounter was that Silva boasted that he was married to the Finance Minister (Luisa Diogo, now Prime Minister), and that he controlled all the judges. Dangerman asked why he had been detained, and Silva supposedly replied "You've been arrested because you're defending the monhes (a derogatory term for people of Indian descent such as the Satars). And you'll spend a long time in jail".
He denied all knowledge of his fellow accused Osvaldo Muianga ("Dudu"), saying that he had only met him in prison. Yet under police interrogation, Dangerman said he had seen Dudu in Unicambios.
When the court asked him about this contradiction, Dangerman claimed that the three police officers involved had obliged him to place Dudu at Unicambios and also to say that he had seen Diamantino dos Santos (the former Maputo city chief attorney, accused of being in league with the Satars) collecting money from Unicambios.
"If I didn't say that, they would have kept me in jail", he claimed. Instead he was released and spent 11 months at liberty, before being rearrested in 2001.
Antonio de Vasconcelos Porto, the lawyer representing Silva, pointed out that Dangerman had also placed Fernando Magno, the man allegedly paid to murder Silva, at Unicambios. Dangerman denied this, and when shown the signed record of his earlier testimony, declared "I don't recognise this document. They've forged my signature".
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Pf/ (593)
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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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