Maputo, Mozambique — The Maputo City Court has finally formalised the detentions of the three men accused of ordering the murder on 22 November last year of Carlos Cardoso, editor of the independent newsheet "Metical".

He was shot dead under a hail of bullets while he was in his car outside his office premises as he was about to drive home.

Judge Antonio Romao Charles has been questioning businessmen Ayob Abdul Satar and Momade Assife Abdul Satar, and former bank manager Vicente Ramaya since Tuesday, and concluded that there was sufficient evidence of their involvement in the murder to hold them.

They are also accused of ordering the attack against lawyer Albano Silva in November 1999. Silva narrowly escaped death when a gunman fired at him through his car window.

Silva may have survived because his car was moving.

The assassins did not make the same mistake with Cardoso when they ambushed his car, immobilising it, before they opened deadly fire.

The thread that links Ramaya, the Abdul Satar brothers, Cardoso and Silva is the massive fraud of 1996, in which 144 billion meticais (14 million US dollars at the exchange rate of the time) was stolen from the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM).

Ramaya was the manager of the BCM branch where the fraud took place, and the Abdul Satar family were among the main beneficiaries of the transaction.

Ramaya, Momade Assife Abdul Satar, and another of his brothers, Asslam Abdul Satar (currently a fugitive in Dubai), are among those who have been publicly named as masterminds of the fraud.

Cardoso had followed the BCM case with tenacity, and had denounced the failure of the Public Prosecutor's Office to bring the culprits to trial. Albano Silva is the BCM's lawyer, who is also determined to see the fraud come to court.

With Wednesday's decision by Romao Charles, Ramaya and the Satar brothers are likely to remain detained until their trial opens.

Also detained are the five men, headed by Anibal Antonio dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), accused of carrying out the actual murder.

The case file now returns to the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), who must continue the preliminary investigation, preparing the case for trial.