Maputo — Almost 17 years after the end of the war of destabilisation, arms caches are still being discovered in Mozambique.

The latest such discovery was on Wednesday, when 25 RPG-7 bazooka rockets and one 82 mm mortar shell were found buried under a tree in a back yard in Tsalala, a neighbourhood in the southern city of Matola.

The arms cache was discovered when the owner of the house, Cremildo Honwana, was uprooting the tree, to clear the land to plant crops. He alerted local officials who called the police, who in turn sought assistance from the armed forces (FADM).

On Thursday a team of eight soldiers and three policemen removed the weapons. They took them for destruction to a plot of land near an old military barracks, some three kilometres from the yard where they were discovered.

The explosion in which the weapons were destroyed set the bush around the barracks on fire, and damaged a window in the car that took AIM journalists to witness the event.

The head of explosives in the Command of the Army, Lt-Col Tomas Alfandega, said he believed the material had been buried prior to the 1992 peace agreement signed between the government and the apartheid-backed Renamo rebels. He did not hazard a guess as to who had buried them.

Tsalala was on a corridor used by Renamo during the war in its occasional incursions into Matola. "Maybe somebody hid the material for use at a future opportunity", said Alfandega. "But that opportunity never came".

Although some of the rockets looked obsolete, Alfandega warned that they might still be dangerous. "Any weaponry, buried or not, can still be alive", he said. "It might explode at any moment".

He urged anyone who found such devices to follow Honwana's example, and notify the authorities so that the weapons could be destroyed.

Honwana told AIM he was worried that there might be other unpleasant surprises hidden under his back yard. He said he only moved to this house four months ago. He thought he was lucky that he had not accidentally set the explosives off, when he dug under the free.

"I'm afraid", he admitted. "I'm even afraid to continue removing this tree trunk, although the soldiers tell me they have removed all the explosives".