23 September 2008
Maputo — The Maputo City Court will decide, within 48 hours, whether to keep Mozambique's former Minister of the Interior, Almerino Manhenje, in preventive detention.
A Tuesday press release from the Attorney-General's Office confirms the reports that Manhenje and eight others were arrested on Monday. Their cases were immediately sent to the Criminal Investigation Section of the city court, so that a magistrate may decide "within the legal deadline of 48 hours" whether they should remain behind bars.
Manhenje was the first of the nine to be detained, at 10.00 in the morning, and the last of the suspects was picked up at 16.00. The release says that, contrary to Monday's reports, Manhenje was not arrested while he was giving a lecture at the Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI). Instead he was picked up on the street in front of ISRI.
The release says the matter is now out of the hands of the prosecution services. It is the city court that must decide whether all or any of the nine remain jailed while investigations continue. The investigating judge may decide to set them free provisionally, with or without bail, and can apply other measures, such as a ban on leaving the city or the country, and the confiscation of their passports.
The nine have been arrested in connection with the disappearance of 220 billion old meticais (about nine million US dollars) from the Ministry of the Interior while Manhenje was minister. He held the post from November 1996 to January 2005. He was also Minister in the Presidency for Defence and Security Matters under President Joaquim Chissano.
Despite the damning audit of the Ministry that Manhenje's successor, Jose Pacheco, ordered on taking office in February 2005, and which showed how much money was missing, the investigations made no headway until President Armando Guebuza sacked Attorney-General Joaquim Madeira and replaced him with Augusto Paulino, a judge with a reputation for integrity and courage.
It was Paulino who struck a major blow against organised crime in the case of the murder of Mozambique's foremost investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000. In a ground breaking trial in 2002-03, Paulino sentenced the businessmen who ordered Cardoso's murder to 24 years imprisonment.
One of Paulino's first moves after his appointment as Attorney-General was to appoint, on 19 September 2007, a team of prosecutors to deal solely with the Interior Ministry scandal. Monday's arrests were the fruit of their work.
The names of the other eight have not yet been released. However, from a reliable source, AIM has confirmed that one of them is the chairperson of the board of the National Social Security Institute (INSS), Armando Pedro. He once undertook consultancy work for the Interior Ministry.
His detention seems unconnected with a separate scandal at the INSS, where the equivalent of eight million dollars went missing between 2002 and 2008, according to a June report from a team of inspectors from the Labour Ministry. A thorough audit of the INSS is now under way.
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