Paul Fauvet
29 July 2008
Maputo — The case of the six men accused of the 1999 attempted murder of prominent lawyer Albano Silva is now before Mozambique's Supreme Court.
The six were all acquitted by the Maputo City Court on 1 July - but neither the public prosecutor, nor Silva's own private prosecution, were at all impressed by the arguments used by judge Dimas Marroa. Both sought leave to appeal against the verdict, and AIM has learnt that the detailed arguments from both have now been lodged with the Supreme Court.
The case has achieved notoriety because of its intimate links with two other high-profile cases - the 1996 fraud that took the equivalent of 14 million US dollars from the country's largest bank, the BCM, and the murder in November 2000 of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso.
Silva was the BCM's lawyer and fought for years to bring the fraudsters to justice. There was never any mystery as to their identity. The money was siphoned out of the BCM through fraudulent accounts opened in the names of members of the Abdul Satar family. All the accounts were opened at the BCM branch in the Maputo neighbourhood of Sommerschield, managed by the Satar accomplice, Vicente Ramaya, who ensured that the dud cheques deposited in the accounts were treated like real money.
Silva found himself facing a wall of indifference and corruption in the Attorney-General's Office. Prominent prosecutors worked on behalf of Ramaya and the Satars, rather than against them. The case file was deliberately disorganized and key documents provided by the bank went missing.
Silva did not give up, and nor did Cardoso, who wrote repeatedly on the need to bring those who had defrauded the BCM to justice, to clean up the Attorney-General's Office, and remove the shield of impunity that organised crime enjoyed.
The two became targets. On 29 November, a gunman fired a shot through Silva's open window, as he was driving along Mao Tse Tung Avenue, one of Maputo's main thoroughfares - but missed. Cardoso was less fortunate. Almost a year later, on 22 November 2000, he was gunned down shortly after leaving his office.
Ramaya, and the two brothers Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini") and Ayob Abdul Satar, are now serving long sentences for ordering the murder of Cardoso. Ramaya and Nini Satar were also found guilty when the BCM case finally made its way into court in 2004.
The Satars were the main suspects for the attempt on Silva's life. In the dock when the trial finally began in April this year were Nini and Ayob Satar, and Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man sentenced to 30 years for recruiting the death squad that murdered Cardoso. He was allegedly in the car that made the abortive attack on Silva.
The three other accused were Fernando Magno, who confessed he had been the gunman who shot at Silva (a confession he later retracted), Paulo Estevao ("Dangerman"), who had been head of security at Ayob Satar's now defunct foreign exchange bureau, Unicambios, and a friend of Anibalzinho, Oswaldo Muianga ("Dudu").
The first oddity about this trial was how long it took to set a date. All the preliminaries were concluded by April 2006. The six men were all charged, all avenues for adding or removing names from the list of defendants were closed, and the case was in the hands of Marroa. There is a norm under Mozambican law that cases where suspects are in preventive detention must take priority. The Albano Silva case, with three defendants (Magno, Dangerman and Dudu) in preventive detention certainly fell into this category.
Yet Marroa did not set a date for the trial until 2008. Since their acquittal Magno and Dangerman have complained at the length of time they spent in jail. They are right - but the blame for this lies squarely with the court, and not with the prosecution.
Marroa's main argument for acquittal was that key evidence was missing. He claimed that, apart from Silva's own statement, there was no evidence that any attempt on his life had taken place. There were no eye-witnesses, there was no spent cartridge, there was not even a police photograph of the damaged car.
Marroa did not say that Silva had made the whole thing up, but his words were immediately seized upon by the Satar brothers who had repeatedly argued during the trial that there was no assassination attempt.
It is undoubtedly true that the police at the Maputo third precinct who interviewed Silva on the night of the attack did not do their job. They had the car in their possession, but made no attempt to examine it. The crime scene was a few metres from the police station, but there was no search for the bullet. These failures had been known ever since 1999, but until this year nobody had regarded them as any reason for dropping the case.
Furthermore, the court made no attempt to fill in the holes. Students at a university residence heard the shot and went to Silva's aid. The court has all the powers it needs to order them to be located and questioned, and likewise for all the officers who were on duty at the police station that night. Most of them are probably still alive. Locating them would be a difficult, but not impossible task. The court, however, never even tried.
The delay in hearing the case allowed one of the accused to change his story dramatically. During the trial Anibalzinho insisted that he had never attended any meetings in the Rovuma Hotel to plot a second attempt on Silva's life. Such meetings, he claimed, were just a fiction invented by Dudu. And in his ruling Marroa seemed to agree - Dudu was not a reliable witness, and so it could not be concluded that there had ever been any meetings at the Rovuma.
Yet at his own trial, also before Marroa, in December 2005, Anibalzinho had insisted on the reality of the Rovuma meetings and had placed the Satar brothers and Ramaya at the hotel. What had changed between December 2005 and April 2008 was that Nyimpine Chissano, oldest son of former President Joaquim Chissano died (of a heart attack in November 2007).
Nini Satar had admitted paying large sums of money to Anibalzinho but claimed that he had done so at the request of the President's son, and had not realized this was payment for a contract killing. Inconveniently for the Satars, for years Anibalzinho denied these claims. At his own trial, and when questioned by prosecutors (on four occasions) into possible links between Nyimpine and Cardoso's death, Anibalzinho insisted that Chissano had nothing to do with it, and that he had been recruited for the murder by the Satars and Ramaya.
Only when Nyimpine was dead and could no longer defend himself, did Anibalzinho perform his somersault. Now he claimed that Chissano had recruited him to kill Cardoso, that the death of Silva had never been discussed, and that the meetings had taken place, not at the Rovuma, but at Nini Satar's house.
Clearly, if the attempted murder case had gone to trial in 2006, Anibalzinho's story would have been very different, and in line with the story he gave during is own trial. But Marroa did not so much as mention Anibalzinho's change of story. It was as if the judge had completely forgotten his own ruling during the earlier trial, when he had expressed no doubt as to the reality of the Rovuma meetings.
This is all the more remarkable in light of Marroa's decision that Dudu could not be trusted because he had changed his story - the changes in Anibalzinho's story, however, were passed over in silence.
The prosecution had argued consistently that in reality Dudu was a much more reliable witness than any of the other accused. The defence lawyers sneered at Dudu as a man with "seven versions" of events - but in reality Dudu said the same thing in April 2008 that he had said when first interviewed by PIC in March 2001: namely that he had attended three meetings with Anibalzinho at the Rovuma where Ramaya and the Satars complained of the failure of the first attempt against Silva and plotted a second.
There was a period of nine months in which Dudu did change his story. Under pressure, he signed a "confession of repentance" in January 2002, claiming that he had told a pack of lies and there were no meetings in the Rovuma. But he tore up that confession in October 2002, and said he had made it because of threats against his life by Nini Satar.
Dudu reverted to his original story and has stuck with it to the present. In all essential aspects the story was stable. It was thus outrageous for Marroa to say "He's probably telling the truth in one of his versions. But which one?"
Other defendants' stories had changed wildly over time, and none more so than that of Nini Satar. When arrested in February 2001, he claimed the real reason for his detention was that he had refused to pay a bribe of a million dollars to the two police inspectors on the case. Later he claimed he was the victim of the manager of the Polana Casino who had got Dudu to incriminate him so that he could not collect debts the casino owed to the Satars. Later still he claimed that judge in the Cardoso case, Augusto Paulino, had been bribed by an Asian businessman to bring the case to trial. He overstepped the mark when he accused Paulino of being a drug trafficker, and thought it prudent to apologise.
During the Cardoso trial, in his attempts to pin the blame on Nyimpine Chissano, he claimed that he had met with Nyimpine in the house of businesswoman Candida Cossa, and that Anibalzinho was not present. But at the latest trial he switched the place of the meeting to his own house, and put Anibalzinho there as well.
It seems extraordinary that Marroa should accuse Dudu of changing his story, while ignoring the far grosser variations in the testimony of Anibalzinho and Satar.
The defence also claimed that Dudu's testimony was invalid because he couldn't remember the numbers of the hotel rooms where the meetings had occurred. So the prosecution made a simple request. Why not take Dudu back to the Rovuma and see if he could identify the rooms used? The Rovuma Hotel is about five minutes walk from the courtroom - it would have been a simple matter for the judge and the lawyers to accompany Dudu there and check his memory on the spot.
But no - when the prosecution asked for Dudu to be taken to the Rovuma, Marroa refused, on the grounds that eight years had passed.
Of course, the simple task of taking Dudu to the hotel was something that the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) should have done in 2001. The lead PIC inspector on the case, Antonio Frangoulis, now claims he should never have taken Dudu seriously - but, instead of quizzing him about the room numbers, a simple visit to the Rovuma would have been in order. Either Dudu would have led the police to the rooms, or he would have been exposed as making the story up. For Frangoulis it would have been no inconvenience - since the PIC headquarters is also only a few minutes walk from the Rovuma.
Relations between Silva and Frangoulis have soured to the point of open hostility. Yet during the trial, Marroa allowed free rein to Frangoulis, including unsubstantiated claims that Silva had indulged in witness tampering, and repeated convenient references to a man in no position to defend himself, the late Nyimpine Chissano. But when Silva wanted to strike back by calling witnesses whom Frangoulis had allegedly attempted to bribe, Marroa refused to subpoena them.
Silva's lawyer, Antonio Vasconcelos Porto, publicly claimed that Frangoulis had offered a bribe of 400,000 dollars to the journalists Augusto de Carvalho and Salomao Antonio, both of the weekly paper "Domingo", to stifle reporting on the Cardoso murder.
Surely it was in the interest of all concerned (including Frangoulis) to clarify this matter? It was a serious charge against a former senior police officer who is now a Frelimo member of parliament. Was it not the duty of the court to call the two journalists as witnesses? Yet once again Marroa turned down the prosecution request.
These are some of the matters which make Marroa's verdict fatally flawed. The judge may well have acted in good faith, and may genuinely have believed that granting the prosecution requests would have served no good purpose. But in doing so, he laid himself open to charges of partiality.
Now the Supreme Court must decide. Unfortunately, the backlog of appeals and the severely limited number of Supreme Court judges, mean that it could take months, or possibly years, before the appeal is heard.
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