Maputo — The re-arrest of Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man who organised the death squad that murdered Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso in November 2000, may help clarify whether other people, who have so far not been charged, were involved in the assassination, according to Attorney-General Joaquim Madeira, interviewed in Tuesday's issue of the daily paper "Noticias".
Anibalzinho was tried in absentia along with five others.
They were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms last Friday. The previous day, Anibalzinho was arrested in Pretoria.
He was extradited, arriving in Maputo on Friday evening, about three hours after the court had sentenced him to 28 years and six months imprisonment.
Madeira said the presence of Anibalzinho in Maputo could help clarify the second case file on the murder. This file, currently in the hands of the Maputo City branch of the Public Prosecutor's Office, names businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano as a suspect.
Those found guilty of ordering the murder were loan shark Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), his brother Ayob Abdul Satar, who owns the Unicambios foreign exchange bureau, and former bank manager Vicente Ramaya. Nini Satar admitted paying Anibalzinho the equivalent of 50,000 US dollars, but claimed he was unaware that the money was for a contract killing. He alleged that the money was a loan to Nyimpine Chissano, who requested that it be given to Anibalzinho.
Clearly prosecutors would like to hear Anibalzinho's version of this deal.
Madeira said that, if it was in his hands, he would like a retrial of Anibalzinho. However, it is not: Anibalzinho, he said, has three options open to him: he can accept the verdict and sentence, he can appeal against them, or he can request a retrial. Prosecutors must now wait for Anibalzinho to make up his mind - he has another 24 hours to decide whether to appeal.
Madeira said Anibalzinho will also be called upon to explain who released him from the top security prison on 1 September.
Madeira's office has opened an inquiry into the illicit release, and 11 police officers have been detained in connection with it.
The Attorney-General also told the paper he expected the case of the 1996 fraud, in which the equivalent of 14 million dollars was stolen from what was then the country's largest bank, the BCM, to reach court in the near future. This case, in which Ramaya and members of the Abdul Satar family are the main suspects, was regarded as the main motive for the murder of Cardoso, and the attempted murder in 1999 of the BCM's lawyer, Albano Silva.
Meanwhile, a version of the recapture of Anibalzinho has appeared in the Sunday paper "Domingo", noted for its excellent sources within the police.
This story claims that the initiative for the re-arrest came from the Attorney-General's Office, which ordered two agents of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), who had been involved in earlier stages of the investigation, to go to South Africa and bring back Anibalzinho.
Their departure, the paper claimed, was delayed by at least three days, because the order from the Attorney-General's Office was not promptly obeyed.
Once in South Africa, the two PIC agents worked with the South African police and an officer linked to Interpol. It should be added that, despite the repeated claims by the Mozambican police that they had requested the assistance of Interpol in tracking down Anibalzinho, neither his name nor his picture ever appeared on the Interpol website, which AIM has regularly checked over the past five months. The "Domingo" story claims that Anibalzinho was in Maputo a fortnight ago, contacting some of his associates, and that it was this visit that eventually led to his re-arrest. This sounds extraordinarily unlikely: the risk of being spotted would have been enormous, since his picture has been repeatedly in the papers and on television.
The first person in Maputo to learn of Anibalzinho's arrest was his mother, Teresinha Mendonca. The South African authorities allowed him a phone call, and he rang her up. She advised him to go to Portugal, since he holds a Portuguese passport.
But when he was hauled before a Pretoria court on Friday morning, Anibalzinho said he wanted to return to Maputo. On the plane journey back to Mozambique, he was accompanied by a police officer named Bule, head of the International Relations Department in the Ministry of the Interior, who is also a nephew of Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje.
When the plane arrived at Maputo airport, the commander of the riot police, Zacarias Cossa, went inside, and removed Anibalzinho's handcuffs. He thus allowed Anibalzinho to stride out of the plane, with a bottle of mineral water in one hand, and waving to the crowd with the other, as if he were a visiting dignitary.
Cossa's excuse was that he needed to replace the South African handcuffs with a Mozambican pair. But Anibalzinho was only re-handcuffed once he was on the tarmac.
