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Mozambique: Albano Silva Case - Phone Records Under the Spotlight
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
7 May 2008
Posted to the web 7 May 2008
Maputo
The spotlight in the trial of six men accused of the 1999 attempted murder of prominent Mozambican lawyer Albano Silva on Wednesday switched to the mobile phone records which the prosecution has used to establish a pattern of communications between the accused.
Several of the accused have denied knowing each other prior to their arrests, and have denied visiting the Rovuma hotel, which is where, according to the prosecution, meetings were held to plot a second attempt on the life of Albano Silva, after the first had failed.
The stories spun by the accused have been tripped up by the phone records. The prosecution admits that, in the absence of phone taps, it is impossible to know the content of any particular phone call. But the records show a pattern of contacts between the accused and other persons or institutions mentioned in the case, including the Rovuma Hotel.
Businessman Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the now defunct Unicambios foreign exchange bureau, had denied all knowledge of Fernando Magno or of Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho") two of the men whom the prosecution alleges were hired to assassinate Silva.
But there are records of phone calls from the Unicambios number to Anibalzinho, and from a mobile phone registered in Ayob Satar's name to both Magno and Anibalzinho in January and February 2001, shortly after the assassination of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, and when the net was beginning to close in on Satar and his brother Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") for that crime.
Ayob explained that in reality that mobile phone belonged to his wife, although the contract was in his name. But would his wife really be interested in phoning Anibalzinho?
He explained this with a story that in January Unicambios had suffered a break-in and one of the items stolen was Nini Satar's cell phone. So Ayob had lent Nini his wife's phone. "It could only have been Nini who made these calls", said Ayob.
But as the hearing continued, Ayob Satar's line changed, and he reverted to his position of the previous week, when he had claimed that the phone records were corrupted. He claimed that shortly after his arrest his bank account, from which the mobile phone bills were paid, had been frozen. As a result the mobile phone company, M-Cel, had disconnected the phone his wife and brother had used. Yet calls dating from 2002 were also on the phone files. "So these files are false!", declared Satar.
His brother went much further, and accused Silva himself of falsifying the records. "This isn't an M-Cel file, it's a piece of paper typed by Albano Silva on a computer", claimed Nini Satar.
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The phone records had been used in previous trials, notably the Carlos Cardoso murder trial, and Satar made no such objection then. He was asking the court to believe that Silva had laboriously typed into a computer hundreds of pages of detailed phone records, which had then succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of all the judges who had looked at them, including members of the Supreme Court.
The lawyer representing Silva, Antonio Vasconcelos Porto, demanded that Satar provide some evidence for his claim. He cited the Mozambican penal procedural code which states that when "incidents of falsehood" are raised in a trial the onus is on the person making the claim to provide proof at once.
Despite this, the presiding judge, Dimas Marroa, accepted a request, originally made by Ayob Satar's defence lawyer, Domingos Arouca, to call in an expert from M-Cel next week to testify to the veracity or otherwise of the records.
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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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