29 April 2008
Maputo — Businessman Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the now defunct foreign exchange bureau Unicambios, on Tuesday denied any involvement in the 1999 attempt to murder one of Mozambique's top lawyers, Albano Silva.
Satar is already serving a lengthy prison sentence for his part in the murder, in November 2000, of journalist Carlos Cardoso, a sentence that was confirmed by the Supreme Court last year. He is now in the dock again, alongside his brother, Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") and four others, accused of conspiring to assassinate Silva.
The prosecution argues that, just as with the Cardoso murder, the motive for the attempted murder of Silva was the country's largest bank fraud, in which the equivalent of 14 million dollars was stolen from the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM) via accounts opened in the names of members of the Abdul Satar family. Silva was the BCM's lawyer, fighting tenaciously, against serious corruption in the Attorney-General's Office to bring the BCM case to court, and Cardoso was his main ally in the press.
Speaking before the Maputo City Court on Tuesday, Ayob Satar denied all knowledge of Fernando Magno and Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the two men allegedly hired to murder Silva. He also denied taking part in conspiratorial meetings in the Rovuma Hotel in central Maputo to plot a second attempt on Silva's life after the first had failed.
The witness to the meetings in the Rovuma, Oswaldo Muianga ("Dudu"), had testified last week that he heard Ayob Satar demand of Anibalzinho "Bring me Albano Silva's tie soaked in blood". Satar denied saying anything of the sort, and declared "Dudu is a liar".
Asked whether he had ever phoned the Rovuma, Satar said he had frequented the shops on the ground floor, and could not remember whether he had ever phoned the hotel. "I'm a businessman, maybe I did. It was a long time ago", he said.
Despite Satar's claims that he had never spoken to Magno or Anibalzinho, the mobile phone records show large numbers of calls to them from the Unicambios phone numbers. Satar dismissed this evidence on the grounds that "40 or 50 people" worked for Unicambios who could have made the call.
Yet Satar had boasted of tight financial control of Unicambios, and that he insisted on personally authorizing any expenditure in excess of five million old meticais (about 200 US dollars at current exchange rates). "So you demanded that payments must be authorized by you, but tolerated enormous numbers of phone calls", remarked Antonio Vasconcelos Porto, the lawyer representing Silva.
With this inconsistency exposed, Satar challenged the veracity of the phone records, suggesting that they had been falsified. His lawyer, Domingos Arouca, claimed that, because the phone records had been added to the case file by Silva, "they are necessarily suspect". This amounts to an accusation that the only cell phone operator in Mozambique at the time, M-Cel, deliberately forged phone records to pervert the course of justice. No evidence has been produced to support such a serious allegation.
Satar even doubted whether the attempt against Silva's life in November 1999 had happened. Though not going as far as his brother Nini, who suggested that Silva had faked the attack, Ayob declared "I can't say whether there was or was not an attack".
He denounced Silva for immediately claiming that the Satar brothers were responsible, and in the process misquoted an article published in Cardoso's paper "Metical". Vasconcelos pointed out that Silva, quoted in this article, did not categorically accuse the Satars, but merely said they were the "main suspects".
This was a fairly uncontentious claim, given that the hottest case Silva was handling was the BCM fraud. Neither the Satars nor anybody else has ever suggested whjo else might have had a motive for eliminating Silva.
Pf/ (644)
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