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Mozambique: War Or Words Between Frangoulis And Albano Silva
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
16 May 2008
Posted to the web 16 May 2008
Maputo
The former head of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) has threatened to sue prominent Mozambican lawyer Albano Silva for libel, reports Friday's issue of the independent weekly "Savana".
An angry dispute between the two men broke out on Monday, when Frangoulis gave evidence at the trial of six men accused with the attempted murder of Silva in 1999.
Frangoulis claimed that Silva, accompanied by senior police officials Zacarias Cossa and Nataniel Macamo, had frequently visited one of the accused, Osvaldo Muianga ("Dudu") in the Maputo Civil Prison, in order to coach him about the evidence he was to give.
Frangoulis was the chief investigator into the murder in November 2000 of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, a case intimately linked with the attempt on Silva's life a year earlier. Three of those convicted of Cardoso's murder, the businessmen Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") and Ayob Abdul Satar, and the man who led the death squad, Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), are also in the dock in the Albano Silva case.
Frangoulis can take some credit for the arrests in the Cardoso case, and for reopening the file on the attempted murder of Silva. But his relationship with Silva, originally friendly, fell apart on suspicion that he was becoming far too close to Anibalzinho and the Satar brothers.
Silva categorically denies that he had any improper contact with prisoners. "Frangoulis accuses me of having visited the prison to instruct Dudu. That's a lie", he told "Savana".
"In fact, it was he who went to contact prisoners", Silva added. "He spends his time lying, saying he went to the top security jail to carry out investigations, while in reality he was dealing with personal interests which had nothing to do with the case".
He accused Frangoulis of links with "organised crime", pointing out that by the time of his mid-2002 conversations with Nini Satar and Anibalzinho, the charge sheet in the Cardoso murder case had already been drawn up. The PIC investigations were finished, and under the Mozambican system any further inquiries should have been made by the investigating magistrate and not by Frangoulis.
Faced with the claims made by Frangoulis in open court, Silva and his legal team responded by asking the judge, Dimas Marroa, to call Cossa and Macamo as witnesses. They also want to call the former Minister of the Interior, Almerino Manhenje, to the witness stand, to give his version of why Frangoulis was sacked in June 2002.
Frangoulis said he was dismissed on the eve of receiving what Anibalzinho and Nini Satar had assured him was "proof" that Nyimpine Chissano, son of the then president Joaquim Chissano, had ordered Cardoso's assassination. Almost six years later there is still no sign of this supposedly conclusive evidence, and Silva is convinced that the Satars dragged Chissano Jr's name into the case just as a smokescreen.
Asked by "Savana" about Silva's claims, Frangoulis threatened to sue him. He said he would wait until the end of the current trial and then, if Silva was unable to prove his claims against Frangoulis, he would initiate libel proceedings.
He declared that Silva had no right to question his visits to the top security prison, and claimed "the problem is that Albano Silva is used to manipulating everybody and everything, and when he hits an obstacle, he loses his direction. That's what's happening".
One particularly serious allegation made by Silva's lawyer, Antonio Vasconcelos Porto, on Monday was that Frangoulis had offered to pay 400,000 US dollars to two journalists (Augusto de Carvalho and Salomao Antonio, both of whom worked on the Sunday paper "Domingo") for their cooperation in stifling reporting on the Cardoso case.
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Silva and Vasconcelos want the two journalists to give evidence. Marroa has not yet ruled on whether the court will call them, or Manhenje, or the senior police officers mentioned by Frangoulis to the stand. He is expected to deliver a ruling on Monday.
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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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