Maputo — The General Commander of the Mozambican police force (PRM), Bernadino Rafael, on Saturday denied that the police had assaulted demonstrators and journalists outside the United Nations offices on Tuesday evening.
For the previous week, former members of the now disbanded security service SNASP had gathered in front of the UN building, claiming that, for the past 20 years, the government had owed each of them five million meticais (about 78,000 US dollars at today's exchange rate, but worth much more two decades ago).
On Tuesday, the police moved against the demonstrators, many of whom were elderly, and journalists attempted to catch these violent scenes on their cameras.
One journalist, Sheila Wilson, who works for the human rights NGO, the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) was thrown into a police vehicle and kept for several hours at a nearby police station before she was released, without charge, the following morning.
A team from the independent television station STV also came under attack, and their camera was stolen. Although the police tried to claim that unidentified thieves had taken the camera, STV was in little doubt that the theft was the work of the police themselves.
On Saturday, four days after the violent scene in front of the UN offices, Rafael made his first public comment on the matter, claiming that the media had maligned the police. He denied that there had been any aggression, against demonstrators or journalists, and challenged reporters to prove otherwise.
The Director of CDD, Adriano Nuvunga, accepted the challenge and accused Rafael of lying. Everything the police commander had said about the incident was untrue "and I am prepared to prove this in court', Nuvunga told STV.
"It's a lie', declared Nuvunga. "The commander wasn't there on the ground. His men were there and they caused the disorder. They violently attacked those elderly men and women who managed to enter the UN premises. They chased them and they beat them'.
The violence was recorded in real time by CDD. The person recording the events was Sheila Wilson, and that was why the police had not yet returned her mobile phone, Nuvunga accused.
The police seemed to believe that without Wilson's recording, there is no proof of their violence. But Nuvunga pointed out that Wilson had broadcast the scenes live back to the CDD.
"We are ready to prove what happened, because our colleague Sheila Wilson was transmitting live, everything was recorded live, and I have the images on my Facebook page'.
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"They have kept her cell phone, because they hope to delete the images. But the images have already been transmitted', he added.
The police say they detained Wilson because she was "causing agitation'. Nuvunga retorted that in reality, she had been abducted and held incommunicado for four hours.
"That's not a detention, it's a kidnapping', he declared. "The law is clear about the procedures for detention. What we saw was the kidnapping of a journalist, and that's a crime'.
As for the theft of the STV camera, Nuvunga said this was not the work of common thieves. It was the police who grabbed the camera, he said, because they did not want the violence outside the UN offices reported on television screens.
The police say they recovered the camera from three unidentified youths in the Maputo neighbourhood of Polana-Canico on Thursday. The youths dropped the camera and ran. Somehow armed police were unable to detain any of them - just as they had been unable to prevent the theft in the first place, even though the streets outside UN offices were swarming with dozens of police agents.
