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Mozambique: 'Gangs Have Captured the Police' Alleges Senior Officer
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
25 July 2008
Posted to the web 25 July 2008
Maputo
The Mozambican police has been "gangsterised", according to Domingos Maita, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) in Maputo in the 1990s.
Maita, who is now retired, holds the rank of police commissioner. He once headed the National Criminal Investigation Department in the Ministry of the Interior, but the minister of the time, Manuel Antonio, never paid much attention to Maita's warnings about the spread of organised crime.
In the late 1990s, Maita repeatedly warned that organised crime was infiltrating the police force - but this was not news that his superiors wanted to hear.
Interviewed in Friday's issue of the independent weekly "Savana", Maita recalled that, back in 1995, "I said that gangs were directing the police from outside the institution, but with the complicity of police officers inside the force. There were signs at that time". But he was ignored, and he believes that the situation has deteriorated since then.
Asked what he meant by a "gangsterised" police, Maita said that nowadays, when a large scale operation is planned against criminal gangs, someone usually tips the criminals off. The information about the operation reaches the gangs, before it reaches the policemen on the ground who are supposed to carry it out, he alleged.
There were even cases of the assassination of police officers. "This is only possible when gangs have captured the police force", declared Maita
"The state is partly responsible for this", he said, "since, in my opinion, a sovereign state should not allow hunger in the barracks" - a polite way of arguing that low wages and poor conditions will drive policemen towards corruption.
Police lack of resources sometimes takes on grotesque forms. Maita said there were cases where the police arrest a suspect - but then, in order to try and prove his innocence, it is the suspect who has to provide the police with a car, fuel and food, in order for them to continue investigating the case".
Maita said he had never come under political pressure - the only type of political interference he was aware of was the failure of the state to provide the police with the resources needed to do their job properly.
The police were short of resources "because there's no political will", he argued. "The police belongs to the state, not to the government, much less to the ruling party".
Maita thought there had been "a great deal of confusion" between the state, the government and the ruling Frelimo Party, which ended up by hindering attempts to make the police a professional force.
While he thought it natural that the national police commander should be appointed on the basis of political trust, that should not be the case with commanders of police stations, of heads of criminal investigation brigades.
"Police operations should never depend on party interests", Maita stressed, "because what is at stake is the sovereignty of the state. Governments and parties come and go, but the state remains, and the police force is the guarantor of the security of the state".
He criticized the government for prioritizing the economy above matters of security. This led to the authorities calling in foreign assistance when serious crimes occurred (he may have been thinking of the murder of the banker Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, in 2001, when it was the South African police who did the forensic work).
"We suffer a lot from imagining that what comes from abroad is always better", said Maita, "but we have cadres who know about investigation and police expertise. Nonetheless, we call for assistance from outside. This is becoming a habit, and it's dangerous for a country's security".
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He pointed out that there are officers trained in criminal investigation techniques in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), but they are kept idle "because somebody doesn't want to equip the crime laboratory".
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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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