12 May 2008
Maputo — The trial before the Maputo City Court of six men accused of the 1999 attempted murder of lawyer Albano Silva took an unexpected turn on Monday when a former senior police officer was accused of offering journalists a huge bribe to stifle reporting on the murder of investigative reporter Carlos Cardoso.
The assassination of Cardoso in November 2000 is inextricably linked to the attempt on Silva's life a year earlier. Silva was the lawyer for the country's largest bank, the BCM, and was attempting to bring to trial those who had defrauded the bank of the equivalent of 14 million US dollars at the time of its privatization in 1996.
Those charged with the fraud included Vicente Ramaya, manager of the BCM branch where it occurred, and several members of the Abdul Satar family, who opened accounts at Ramaya's branch with the sole purpose of syphoning out money fraudulently.
The prosecution alleges that Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") and his brother Ayob Abdul Satar ordered the assassination of Silva. When it failed, they supposedly plotted a second attempt, but switched their attentions to Cardoso who had been running a vigorous campaign in his paper "Metical" seeking to bring the fraudsters to justice and purge the Attorney-General's office of the prosecutors who were protecting them.
The man eventually put in charge of investigating the Cardoso murder was Antonio Frangoulis, then the director of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), and now a parliamentary deputy for the ruling Frelimo Party. His investigations led to reopening the dossier on the attempted murder of Silva, which his predecessors had allowed to gather dust for more than a year.
But on Monday the lawyer representing Silva, Antonio Vasconcelos Porto, queried the integrity of Frangoulis and suggested that in reality he had not been interested in a successful outcome to the Cardoso case. Frangoulis rejected the claim, retorting that it was because of his persistence in following all leads in the Cardoso case that he lost his job.
Frangoulis was dismissed in June 2002 (five months before the start of the Cardoso murder trial) and the Ministry of the Interior told him to go and study English in South Africa. He is convinced that this was because people in senior people were uncomfortable about his investigations. "If I had suggested stifling the Cardoso case, then I would have been promoted, not sacked", he told the court.
Vasconcelos did not buy this, and asked Frangoulis if he had offered a bribe to two journalists, Augusto de Carvalho and Salomao Antonio (both of whom worked on the Sunday paper "Domingo"), to suffocate press coverage of the case. Allegedly, Frangoulis had offered them 400,000 US dollars, with promises of more to come.
This is the first time such an allegation has been made in public. Frangoulis laughed it off, saying that he had never heard the claim before. Far from him offering a bribe, it had been Nini Satar who in 2002 had offered him 400,000 dollars. "I told him his money meant nothing to me", said Frangoulis.
Vasconcelos asked the presiding judge, Dimas Marroa, to call the two journalists as witnesses, a request Marroa has not yet ruled on.
"Let them come!" declared Frangoulis. "I have no problems. My hands are clean".
He said that during the final stages of his investigations, both Nini Satar and Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man who led the death squad that murdered Cardoso, tried to implicate Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of the then President, Joaquim Chissano, in the crime. This was over a year after the two had been arrested, during which time they had not mentioned Nyimpine's name.
Anibalzinho told Frangoulis that he repented of his part in the killing, and claimed "there are people inside this prison who ought to be outside, and people outside who ought to be inside". Giving testimony at this trial, Anibalzinho said that Frangoulis was so convinced by his story that he issued a warrant for the arrest of Nyimpine Chissano - but Frangoulis categorically dined this tale. It was too late in the proceedings to add another accused to those who were due to stand trial for Cardoso's murder.
Besides, Frangoulis wanted proof of Nyimpine's involvement, but all Satar could show him was a series of postdated cheques signed by Nyimpine, and drawn on the account of his car hire company, Expresso Tours. These, Frangoulis told Satar, did not prove anything, since there was no evidence of what the money was for.
Both Anibalzinho and Satar claimed they had documents that would prove that Chissano Jr ordered Cardoso's murder. Frangoulis said he received a phone call promising that they were about to deliver this "proof" - but before he could receive it he was sacked.
If this supposedly conclusive proof exists, it has never seen the light of day. At the Cardoso murder trial, which ran from November 2002 to January 2003, Satar produced the seven cheques signed by Nyimpine which Frangoulis had already warned him were no proof at all. He showed nothing else that tied Nyimpine to the crime.
As for Anibalzinho, he mysteriously escaped from the Maputo top security jail in September 2002, and so did not testify during the trial. He was sentenced in absentia. But he was recaptured and the Supreme Court allowed him a second trial. By then (December 2005) Anibalzinho's story had changed radically, and he insisted that it was the Satar brothers and Ramaya who had ordered Cardoso's murder.
It is only now, in mid-2008, that he has reverted to blaming Nyimpine - who cannot answer the charge because he died of a heart attack last November.
Frangoulis rejected claims by several of the accused that he had coached them in what to say during their initial interrogations, or had threatened them in any way. "It was never part of my methods to use any physical or moral coercion", he said. During interrogations, he had been careful not even to swear at the accused (though he admitted to cursing when they rang him up, using mobile phones smuggled into their cells).
Fernando Magno, whom the prosecution claims was hired by Nini Satar to murder Silva, told the court in his testimony that he confessed to the crime because Frangoulis told him it was the only way to avoid indictment on the more serious charge of participating in the Cardoso murder. Frangoulis flatly denied this, saying that he "never used blackmail".
He added that he ordered Magno's arrest because he had received credible information that Magno was paid to assassinate Silva, but used the money for a trip to Portugal instead (this is in line with claims that the assassins deliberately bungled their task because Magno had not paid them).
"Magno has lied to the court", said Frangoulis. "Why would I tell him what to say? I have no personal interest in the case".
Frangoulis said he now doubted the credibility of Oswaldo Muianga ("Dudu"), who claims he took part in conspiratorial meetings at the Rovuma Hotel in central Maputo to plot the second attempt to murder Silva. According to Muianga, Anibalzinho, Ramaya and each of the Satar brothers were supposedly present in at least one of the three meetings held at the Rovuma.
Frangoulis said Muianga had damaged his own credibility by changing his story, and spoke of seven or eight different versions he had told. But in reality, taking Muianga's story in its essentials, there are only two versions - that the meetings took place, and that they didn't.
Muianga withdrew his original testimony in March 2002, and signed a "Confession of Repentance" in which he claimed that his accusations against Ramaya and the Satar brothers were all false. But by October 2002 he had withdrawn the withdrawal, and reverted to his original story. Muianga told pretty much the same story about the Rovuma meetings at the Cardoso murder trial and at this trial.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
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.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
