Maputo — Mozambique's Supreme Court has ordered the release on bail of the former Minister of the Interior, Almerino Manhenje, who has been under detention in a Maputo prison on corruption charges since 22 September 2008.

Manhenje should have been released on Tuesday - but by the time the Supreme Court ruling reached the Maputo City Court, the body which must issue the release papers, the court had closed down for the day. Wednesday was a public holiday, and so Manhenje will only step out of jail on Thursday.

His bail was set at 350,000 meticais (about 12,700 US dollars). Two others charged in the same case, Rosario Fidelis (former director of administration and finance in the Interior Ministry) and Alvaro Nuno de Carvalho (head of budget implementation in the Ministry, and thus number two to Fidelis) were also released on bail.

Given conditional freedom, but with no bail requirement, were Lourenco Mathe (head of logistics in the riot police at the time of his arrest), Serafim Sira (Mathe's predecessor as head of riot police logistics), Manuel Mome (treasurer of the Interior Ministry), and Dionisio Colege (treasurer of the riot police).

Manhenje and his subordinates were initially accused of the theft of large sums of money from the Interior Ministry's coffers. When the current minister, Jose Pacheco, took over from Manhenje in early 2005, he called in the auditors, who found that 220 billion old meticais (8.8 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time) could not be accounted for.

Prosecutors followed up the audit report, and made their arrests in September 2008, charging Manhenje with 49 separate offences. But to the surprise of the prosecuting team, a Maputo city judge, Octavio Chuma, threw out most of the charges in February 2009.

The prosecutors appealed against Chuma's decision, and fought to reinstate the charges. On Tuesday, almost a year later, the Supreme Court dismissed the prosecution appeal, maintaining just one charge against Manhenje, and ordering his release. The path is now clear for setting a trial date.

Chuma's dispatch, now upheld by the Supreme Court, means that Manhenje only faces a charge of misappropriating 500,000 meticais (about 19,000 US dollars).

Among the charges that Chuma tossed out were three counts of abuse of Manhenje's position, 42 counts of "payment of undue remunerations", and three counts of "hierarchically superior complicity" (which refers to the former minister's complicity with offences allegedly committed by his subordinates).

Asked about the Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday, Attorney-General Augusto Paulino claimed it was not a defeat for his office. Indeed, he told reporters he thought it reasonable to grant conditional release to people who had been in preventive detention for 16 months.

"We aren't frustrated", he said. "The Supreme Court decided to uphold the decision of the judge to accuse the ex-Minister of only one of the 49 crimes with which he was initially charged. But it also recommended a deeper investigation into the payment of fictitious wages. Initially 70 people were indicated as benefiting from undue wages. But as the investigations continued, the numbers fell".

Paulino was putting a good face on a serious setback for the prosecution services. A year ago prosecutors were indignant at Chuma's decision to drop most of the charges. Prosecution sources cited by the media at the time said there was documentary evidence that Chuma had ignored, and that others involved in the same draining of state funds had admitted it. They claimed there were serious problems in Chuma's dispatch, including proven facts against the accused which the judge did not accept as criminal in nature.