Maputo — The South African police have arrested Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man accused of organising the death squad that murdered Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, in November 2000.
According to a Friday morning report on Radio Mozambique, Anibalzinho was picked up in Pretoria, after the South African authorities received information from the Mozambican police.
The report added that Anibalzinho will be extradited to Mozambique on Saturday.
The timing of the arrest and extradition are very convenient. Since 18 November, Anibalzinho has been tried in absentia, along with five other defendants: but the trial is now over, and all that remains is for the court to pass sentence on Friday morning.
With Anibalzinho due to arrive in Maputo on Saturday he will not have a chance to speak in a public court room, and the Mozambican public will not be able to hear his account of the murder and who ordered it.
Anibalzinho was illicitly released from the Maputo top security prison on 1 September: the promised report into his disappearance has still not been made public five months after the event.
There was never any serious doubt as to his whereabouts.
Since his specialism was trafficking is stolen cars between Mozambique and South Africa, it was always likely that he would seek the protection of criminal accomplices in South Africa.
False trails were laid - such as the November claim by his mother, Teresinha Mendonca, that Anibalzinho was in London, or the ridiculous police leak to the weekly paper "Savana" that he was holed up on the island of Ibo, off the northern Mozambican coast.
Claims by police commander Miguel dos Santos that Anibalzinho was alive and well led to suspicions that the police knew where he was, but had no intention of bringing him back until the trial was over.
Anibalzinho was the key link between those who ordered the assassination and those who carried it out. According to the prosecution, loan shark Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), his brother Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the foreign exchange bureau Unicambios, and former bank manager Vicente Ramaya, hired Anibalzinho to murder Cardoso.
Anibalzinho then recruited the two other members of the death squad, Carlitos Rachide and Manuel Fernandes. Both of them have confessed to the crime, and testified that Anibalzinho drove the car that was used to ambush Cardoso.
The defence of Nini Satar is that, while he paid large sums of money to Anibalzinho (the equivalent of 50,000 US dollars), this was on the instructions of businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano.
Anibalzinho's testimony would thus have been important as to the involvement or otherwise of Nyimpine Chissano, and of Ayob Satar and Vicente Ramaya, both of whom deny having any dealings with him.
