Maputo — Carlos Cardoso was murdered "because he was a journalist who denounced abuses, who did not shut up, who would not forget any matter, who insisted on following what he regarded as most important, and who would not allow any of the illegalities he had written about to fall into oblivion", declared the Cardoso family lawyer, Lucinda Cruz, on Monday.

Presenting the summing up of the private prosecution in the Cardoso murder trial, Cruz said that, for those affected by his writings, "Carlos Cardoso was a pain, he was obstinate, he was really inconvenient. The only way for any criminal to go on practicing crimes with impunity was to silence Carlos Cardoso.

And the only way to silence Carlos Cardoso was to kill him".

But for three of the accused, the members of the death squad, Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), Manuel Fernandes and Carlitos Rashid, the motive was not remotely political: they killed because they were paid to do so. She expressed revulsion at the behaviour of the confessed assassins, Rashid and Fernandes, "who have come into this room countless times, laughing and very pleased with themselves, as if taking a human life had not the slightest importance".

For those charged with ordering the murder - Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the Unicambios foreign exchange bureau, his brother, money-lender Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), and former bank manager, Vicente Ramaya - Cruz had no doubt that the main motive for the crime was the fraud which had seen 144 billion meticais (14 million US dollars) syphoned out of the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM), a crime which took place at Ramaya's BCM branch, and used accounts opened by members of the Abdul Satar family.

The Satars and Ramaya, she argued, were worried, not so much because Cardoso was investigating the fraud, "but because he was not going to stop writing about it until it came to trial.

Cardoso believed that taking this case to court could be a step forward in making Mozambican justice credible".

But Cruz stressed that the Cardoso family did not rule out other motives and other people who may also have ordered the killing. "For the assassination of a person such as Carlos Cardoso, there need not be just one motive", she stressed.

She said there were plenty of examples of crimes committed by several people each with their own motive, and "united in a single purpose - to kill someone".

The accusations made in court against other people - notably against businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano - "deserve to be investigated seriously", said Cruz. "But these accusations were made late.

This means that Nyimpine Chissano is the subject of a separate case file, which has not yet come to trial, and so he can neither be sentenced nor acquitted here".

Only the autonomous case against Chissano Jr, currently in the hands of the Public Prosecutor's Office, could decide whether he too should be brought to trial for the murder. Cruz stressed that "it is up to civil society, and the friends of Carlos Cardoso to demand that the investigation continue".

Civil society and the mass media, she urged, should ensure that the accusations against Nyimpine Chissano and several others "are not forgotten, and that this case does not join the heap of other cases that have ground to a halt in the various stages of criminal investigation".

Cruz noted that the defence lawyers had often criticised the poor police work in investigating the murder. She agreed with them - in fact, it had been Cardoso's family and friends who were the first "to denounce the apathy and incapacity of our police.

In the more than 5,000 pages in this case file, there are countless examples of obstructing justice and of failure to cooperate with the judicial system".

She believed that there was now enough evidence, as a result of the investigations and trial, to open over a hundred new cases, "concerning crimes and illegalities committed by public and private institutions, and by individuals". Again, it would be up to civil society to oblige the public prosecutor's office to take its job seriously, and pursue all these cases.

Despite his physical absence, this trial, broadcast live on Mozambican radio and television, "could be regarded as the last and greatest report of the journalist Carlos Cardoso. At this trial, a vast number of crimes have been denounced before all of us, including money-laundering, usury, the illegal transfer of foreign exchange, car thefts, bank frauds, trafficking in influence, illegal loans, and corruption in its most varied forms, including corrupt relations between police officers and prisoners". "The live broadcasts of this trial have achieved what Carlos Cardoso was unable to do while alive", Cruz added. "It has carried his voice to the most remote parts of Mozambique. And it has made us aware that we were losing the moral values that are universally recognised, regardless of political regime or religious creed".

She praised the blanket coverage of the trial in most of the Mozambican media. She did not think that radio and television had broadcast it live, just to win larger audiences. "These broadcasts were the way for the media to pay tribute to the man who was the most courageous and outspoken journalist Mozambican society has ever known", Cruz declared. "It was their way of giving a voice, perhaps for the last time, to a man whose voice had been silenced in such a barbaric and criminal fashion".

Cruz stressed her agreement with the presiding judge, Augusto Paulino, who had declared in December that Anibalzinho, the fugitive who headed the death squad, "may be stronger than each one of us on our own, but will not be stronger than all of us together".

Criminals were only strong, if society allowed them to be strong, she stressed. "All of us together, society united, will defeat any criminal, and can always bring criminals to trial, no matter how influential, how important, how wealthy, they may be".