Maputo — The fugitive Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), one of the six men charged with the murder of Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, has sent a video tape from his hideout to the Maputo City Court - but the judge presiding at the murder trial, Augusto Paulino, on Thursday refused point blank to show the tape.
Antonio Frangoulis, the former head of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), received the tape on Monday from the hands of Anibalzinho's mother, Teresinha Mendonca.
He passed it on to the court on Wednesday, but first took the precaution of viewing it himself, just to ensure that it was what Mendonca said, and not a hoax. "I couldn't risk handing a pornografic tape to the court", Frangoulis told the weekly paper "Zambeze".
He declined to reveal the content of the tape, but guaranteed that he recognised the face and voice of Anibalzinho on the tape.
At Thursday session of the trial, Paulino read out the short dispatch he had issued the previous day on how to deal with the tape. It said simply "Deposit the tape in the strongbox and wait for the accused to appear in court".
"This individual is in hiding, we don't know where, and he sends us tapes telling the court how it should operate", said Paulino. "He sends us tapes instead of presenting himself".
Paulino said he regarded this as a matter of "state sovereignty". The state, he insisted, "cannot be held hostage to the will of a simple Anibalzinho. It cannot be subject to the remote control of an Anibalzinho".
The modern definition of a state, he added, was "the people, politically organised, in a given territory - and the Mozambican people, politically organised from the Rovuma to the Maputo (the rivers marking the northern and southern boundaries of the country), cannot be manipulated by remote control by Anibalzinho".
"Anibalzinho may be stronger than each one of us individually, but he is not stronger than the state", the judge added.
So the tape stays under lock and key - and if Anibalzinho is never recaptured, then it will be destroyed, Paulino pledged.
Paulino also revealed that the court has written to the Portuguese authorities seeking their collaboration in the re- arrest of Anibalzinho.
After Anibalzinho was illicitly released from the top security prison on 1 September, the court waited the statutory 60 days to give him a chance to surrender, and then went ahead with the procedure for trying him in absentia. But, under a judicial agreement between Mozambique and Portugal, the court also contacted the Portuguese Ministry of Justice "since Anibalzinho is a Portuguese citizen, and murder is a crime in Portugal too", said Paulino.
Should Anibalzinho be found in Portugal, the court asked that he be arrested and tried there. Copies of this request - in both Portuguese and English - were sent to the Mozambican Foreign Ministry, so that they could be passed on to other countries.
Has this been done ? Government officials have repeatedly claimed that the police forces of neighbouring countries and Interpol have been informed of the hunt for Anibalzinho - but AIM knows of no evidence to back up these claims. On the contrary, there has been no sign of Anibalzinho's name in the "Wanted" section of the Interpol website on the Internet.
Other copies of the Anibalzinho tape are circulating in Maputo. One of those who had seen it told AIM that it was "full of lies".
The political purpose of the tape is clear - for in it Anibalzinho claims that those who ordered the killing of Cardoso were the brothers Ayob and Momade Abdul Satar, and nobody else.
He claims that another of the accused, former bank manager Vicente Ramaya, had nothing to do with the killing, and that businessman Nyimpine Chissano, oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano, is also innocent.
The suspicion arises that Anibalzinho's release was conditional on him heaping the entire blame for the killings onto the shoulders of the Satars, who have become expendable.
Anibalzinho also apologises to the family of Cardoso "for everything that happened". But the family and friends of Carlos Cardoso do not want his apologies - they want Anibalzinho brought to justice, joining his co-conspirators before the Maputo City Court.
The tape "makes you want to throw up", said AIM's source.
"He's a monster".
