30 December 2008
Maputo — The Mozambican Interior Ministry has sacked the entire leadership of the Maputo City Police Command following revelations that it was they, and not mere low level prison guards, who were responsible for the escape of three assassins earlier this month.
The three killers are Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), who recruited and led the death squad that murdered Mozambique's finest investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, in November 2000, a crime for which he was serving a 30 year prison sentence; Luis de Jesus Tomas ("Todinho"), implicated in the murder of the director of the Maputo Central Prison, Jorge Microsse; and Samuel Januario Nhare ("Samito"), accused of murdering several police officers.
All three were incarcerated in the cells of the Maputo City Police Command, and all three escaped, apparently through a hole knocked in a first floor corridor wall, in broad daylight on the morning of 7 December.
Interior Minister Jose Pacheco immediately appointed a commission of inquiry, chaired by the National Director of Criminal Investigation, Carlos Come. The Commission's report was made public on Monday, and it blames all the senior members of the Command for the escape.
The report says that the five senior officers who ran the Command knew that Anibalzinho, Todinho and Samito were preparing to escape, but took no measures to stop them. Politely, this is known as negligence, though a more appropriate term would be complicity.
The report says that the officers were warned of the impending escape attempt on 5 December, and they following day they received a document (presumably written by their subordinates) informing them of the hole in the wall.
So the hole had been made, not overnight, but at least 24 hours before the escape, and would have been plainly visible to anyone walking across the Command courtyard.
This document also revealed that Todinho had been visiting the other two murderers in their cells, and that in searches made of the three men's cells various metallic instruments, doubtless used to make the hole, had been found and confiscated.
All five senior officers visited the three cells on 6 December, and again on the morning of 7 December. They took no measures to prevent the escape. They did not even order that the hole in the wall be blocked up, and did not note the hole in the daily log book, as the police rules dictate.
The most senior officer concerned is the Maputo City Police commander, Jose Domingos Tomas, whom Pacheco sacked last week. He replaced him with the former commander of the riot police, Jose Weng San.
The other four officers implicated in the escape are the Maputo City Director of Order and Public Safety, Feliciano Juvane, the head of operations, Clemente Nhacula, the head of the protection department, William Faife Tivane, and the head of the cells, Jorge Torrezao.
Juvane was ambushed and assassinated at his central Maputo home on 16 December, and there has been speculation that the two gunmen involved were Samito and Todinho. This might suggest that a deal between Juvane and the assassins went badly wrong.
The four other officers have all been relieved of their duties. They and Tomas will now face both disciplinary and criminal proceedings.
On receiving the report from the Commission of Inquiry, Pacheco ordered the immediate release of the six guards who had been arrested immediately after the escape was detected. The Commission did not find any evidence that they were involved in preparing or assisting the escape. They were not completely exonerated, and suffered one of the minor sanctions in the police disciplinary rules, that of a written admonition.
As for the attempts to recapture the three fugitives, the police merely say that they are continuing to pursue the matter.
This is the third time that Anibalzinho has escaped. He is known to have relatives abroad, and during his two previous escapes he immediately left the country, for South Africa in September 2002, and for Canada in May 2004. He may well have slipped across the border again.
This option might also be attractive to Anibalzinho because of his connections with the South African criminals with whom he used to work when he was a car thief. Furthermore, his chances of remaining undetected in Mozambique are slim: his repeated appearances on television have given him a notoriety which Samito and Todinho lack. They stand a chance of walking the streets unnoticed, while Anibalzinho does not.
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Looks like the real culprits are not being mentioned here. The big fish are hiding behind government apparatus. The collapse of the Commercial Bank has everything to do with this. The collapse itself could not have been possible without government official's complicity. Late Nyimbine Chissano, the son of the former president, never spent a minute in jail even though his name was all over this whole case. What a sham.