Maputo — Lawyers for the defendants in the Carlos Cardoso murder trial on Monday urged the Maputo City Court to acquit their clients, or, in the cases of those who confessed to the assassination, to show clemency in the light of "mitigating circumstances".
But, unlike the carefully produced prosecution summaries, the last words from several of the defence lawyers seemed to have been thrown together hastily and incoherently.
Worst of all was Portuguese lawyer Eduardo Jorge, representing the loan shark Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini").
Jorge did such violence to the Portuguese language that parts of his summing up were entirely incomprehensible. His habit of beginning a sentence but never ending it meant that some of his arguments were impossible to follow.
He admitted his client's character defects - Nini, he said, was indeed arrogant, loved money, and had committed usury. But if he was as powerful, and influential as some people claimed "then how come he is in prison and not outside ?" Jorge had to face the awkward fact that last year Nini Satar had tried to involve the judge, Augusto Paulino, and senior police officers, including Antonio Frangoulis, former head of the Maputo Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), in an alleged conspiracy to extort a million dollars from him.
"Nini erred - out of despair - when he went after the judge and the police officers", said Jorge. "Did he do it on purpose ?
I don't think so".
He claimed that the prosecution had produced "no serious evidence" that his client had ordered the murder of Cardoso. It was true that he had made payments to the man who recruited the death squad, the fugitive Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho") - but he had claimed not to know what these payments were for, and the prosecution had not proved otherwise, Jorge said.
Domingos Arouca, lawyer for Nini's brother, Ayob Abdul Satar, knew that his client was innocent because he, Arouca, was his next-door neighbour. "Frequently he comes to my house, and seeks my advice", said Arouca. Sometimes they sat in the garden together. So he couldn't possibly be an assassin.
A somewhat more serious line was to separate Ayob from Nini.
Arouca claimed that Ayob's company, the foreign exchange bureau Unicambios, "never made illicit payments". The post-dated cheques for 1.29 billion meticais (over 50,000 US dollars) shown to the court "are a personal deal between Nini and Nyimpine Chissano (oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano). They are not in the name of Unicambios, and Nyimpine said he doesn't even know Ayob.
At no time did Nini inform Ayob of these payments".
Simeao Cuamba, lawyer for Anibalzinho, and for one of the confessed assassins, Manuel Fernandes, appeared to believe that the best strategy was to send the court into a deep sleep.
Certainly this reporter had great difficulty in keeping his eyes open as Cuamba rambled on about the 19th century Italian criminal anthropologist Lumbruso (who thought that criminal "types" could be detected by the shape of their heads), cited Emmanuel Kant, and invoked Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel.
The occasional outrageous remark did wake the audience up - as when Cuamba alleged that the staff on Cardoso's newspaper "Metical" had not done enough to protect their editor, or claimed that there was no attempted murder of Cardoso's driver, Carlos Manjate, because the bullet that struck him in the head was not intended for him.
Abdul Gani, lawyer for Vicente Ramaya, left no such nasty taste in the mouth. Indeed, of all the defence lawyers, he seemed the only one who had taken the trouble to read Cardoso's work thoroughly.
Unfortunately, he reduced this to a statistical exercise.
The fraud at the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM), where Ramaya had been a branch manager, and which involved the theft of 144 billion meticais (14 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time) could not have been the motive for the murder, because Cardoso had written much more about other subjects, Gani claimed.
He had counted five articles or editorials on the BCM in "Metical" in 1999, and 20 in 2000, prior to Cardoso's death. But in the same period there had been 59 articles on the cashew processing industry. There had been 32 articles on the introduction of Value Added Tax (to which Cardoso was opposed) in 1999, and there had been 37 articles on the customs service in 2000. Ergo, the BCM was not a key issue.
Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with Cardoso's work knows how passionately he felt about the destruction of the cashew processing industry, as the government blindly followed a diktat from the World Bank. Nor is there any doubt that Cardoso thought that handing over the management of the customs service to the British firm, Crown Agents, violated Mozambican sovereignty.
But it is a huge leap to conclude that these could be motives for murder. Gani did not draw the logical conclusion from his own argument - he did not suggest that the World Bank, the Crown Agents or the VAT office had hired the death squad.
The key difference is that, when Cardoso wrote about cashew or customs, he was hoping to change government policy. When he wrote about the BCM, he was hoping that those who defrauded the bank would be brought to justice.
The defence lawyers tried hard to discredit key defence witnesses, particularly Osvaldo Muianga ("Dudu"), who had testified to meetings in the Rovuma hotel, attended by Anibalzinho, the Satar brothers and Ramaya, at which murder was planned.
Muianga had changed his story so many times that he was not credible, they claimed. Gani took Muianga's inability to describe the rooms where he had attended meetings over two years previously as an indication that the meetings had never happened.
Arouca claimed that Muianga was so distinctive (a very short man wearing moslem clothes) that the hotel staff would have recognised him if he had really been to the Rovuma.
Samuel Valentim, lawyer for Carlitos Rashid, the man who admits firing the shots that took Cardoso's life, had the easiest task. He merely asked the court to take account of his "free and spontaneous confession" as a mitigating circumstance.
He claimed that Rashid committed the crime because of his poverty (he was having difficulty paying the rent on his house) and because of "bad company" such as Anibalzinho.
