Maputo — Defence lawyers in the Carlos Cardoso murder trial on Thursday tried to discredit a key prosecution witness, Osvaldo Muianga, by showing that conspiratorial meetings he claimed to have attended could not have happened.
Muianga has repeatedly changed his story. Initially, he spoke of a series of meetings held in "room 105 or 106" of the Rovuma Hotel which plotted to assassinate lawyer Albano Silva and journalist Carlos Cardoso.
He later retracted this story, and then retracted the retraction. When he took the witness stand in the trial, he insisted that the meetings at the Rovuma had taken place, involving four of the accused, the fugitive Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), loan shark Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), his brother Ayob, and former bank manager Vicente Ramaya.
But in this latest version the meetings were held exclusively to discuss murdering Albano Silva, and said nothing about Cardoso. Furthermore, Muianga's memory of the Rovuma had gone blank. He could no longer remember which floor or room the meetings had been held in. He thought they had been held in a "normal" room with no television or mini-bar.
On Thursday, Momade Satar's lawyer, Eduardo Jorge, called the resident manager of the Rovuma, Vasco Manhica, to the witness stand. He said that the room numbers in the hotel start at 401, and go to 1216: the numbering is such because there are rooms on the fourth to twelfth floors. The lower floors are occupied with shops, offices, restaurants, bars, and conference facilities.
Although Manhica has only worked in the Rovuma since February 2002 (two years after the meetings described by Muianga), he was sure that the numbering of the rooms had never changed.
All the rooms possess televisions, he said. He thought there was only a "remote possibility" that any room had been left temporarily without a television: for, whenever a TV set breaks down, and the client complains, the hotel immediately replaces it.
In principle, visitors should not be able to access the hotel rooms without hotel staff being aware of their presence, he said. But he admitted that there is no real control: visitors do not have to go via the reception to reach the rooms, they can instead take a lift from the second floor bar, and there are no controls over who enters the bar.
The court also heard from Momade Satar's bodyguard, Orlando Maluleque (not Orlando Malate, as erroneously reported to the court on Wednesday), who seemed to have an excellent memory for the day of Cardoso's murder, but a very patchy one for events before or after the killing.
On that day, 22 November 2000, he and Satar went to Satar's home as usual, leaving Satar's office at the Unicambios foreign exchange bureau at 17.30 or 18.00. Maluleque hung around in the car, chatting to other guards, waiting to see if his employer had any other tasks for him.
He said he heard of Cardoso's murder on the 19.30 news on Radio Mozambique, and at 20.00 he knocked on the door, and asked Satar if he could go home. Satar obliged, but before he left, he saw Satar drive off with a friend named Firoz. (Satar claims that on that night he dined with Firoz and with a second friend, Riaz).
Asked about businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano, Maluleque said he had visited Satar at Unicambios "many times". But under further question it turned out that Maluleque's idea of "many" is any number bigger than two.
He scaled Chissano's visits to Unicambios down to at least three, but added that he had gone with Satar to Chissano's office "three or four times". Asked about this office, Maluleque gave a reasonably accurate description of the whereabouts of Nyimpine Chissano's company, the travel agency and car hire firm, Expresso Tours.
The bodyguard thus claimed that his employer had met with Nyimpine Chissano on at least six occasions, thus frontally contradicting Chissano who told the court that he had only met Momade Satar once and had never done any business with him.
Maluleque claimed that Satar paid him a wage of just a million meticais (42 US dollars at current exchange rates) a month, and that since the arrest of the Satar brothers in March 2001 he has not been paid at all.
The Thursday trial session came to an early end, because the defence had no more witnesses to present. The defence lawyers had drawn up a much longer list of witnesses - but at the last moment decided to dispense with at least half of them.
One defence witness, Phillip Nevitt, the former financial manager of the Polana Casino, is currently in South Africa, and will be called later.
The prosecution expressed an interest in calling Albano Silva to testify, while the defence suddenly asked for journalist Marcelo Mosse, who was effectively Cardoso's deputy on the daily newsheet "Metical", to be subpoenaed.
The presiding judge, Augusto Paulino, wanted to hear a more detailed justification for both these requests before he would grant them.
With no further business, Paulino adjourned the court for the festive season. The trial will resume on 6 January. Paulino warned that there will be no further interruptions: thus as soon as the defence, the prosecution and the court itself have stopped calling on people to give evidence or clarify points, the lawyers must be prepared to make their closing statements.
