Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso’s alleged murderer escaped from Maputo’s top security prison on Sunday night. His trial had been expected to start later this month.
The escape would have come as no surprise to the former head of the criminal investigation police, Antonio Frangoulis, who, two months ago, had sent a letter to the Minister of Interior and the head of the prison saying Anibal Antonio dos Santos Junior, known as Anibalzinho, was preparing his escape because he expected to be convicted. Frangoulis sent the letter shortly after he was unexpectedly removed from his post and from the murder investigation.
Mozambique has recently won praise from donors for its crackdown on petty corruption by low-level officials. So far, however, there has been no crackdown on grand corruption. Investigations have been blocked and there have been no prosecutions of the high-level officials involved in more than $400-million in bank frauds. There has been no investigation of the assassination one year ago of Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, the Central Bank’s head of banking supervision, who was killed just as he was talking to senior officials about their role in the frauds.
Sources close to the Cardoso murder case say that despite restrictions on what he was allowed to investigate, Frangoulis had found evidence of high-level links to the Cardoso assassination, and that this may explain his sudden removal from the case. Some of the accused are also said to have warned that if they went to trial, they would produce evidence of such links and of official involvement in money laundering.
Cardoso, Mozambique’s best-known journalist and editor of the fax daily Metical, was investigating high-level corruption when he was gunned down near his office on November 22 2000. At first there was no investigation, but after an international campaign, six people were arrested. Anibalzinho was accused of organising the killing and of driving the car that ambushed Cardoso. He was subsequently also accused of attempting to murder Albano Silva, a promi- nent lawyer and husband of Finance Minister Luisa Diogo, in 1999.
Anibalzinho escaped despite being guarded by three security teams — the Presidential Guard, the riot police and the ordinary police. His cell had three locks, and each security team had a key to one of the locks. The general commander of the police, Miguel dos Santos, announced on Tuesday that the platoon commanders of the three units guarding the prison had been arrested.
In June Mozambique’s Mandrax king escaped from the same “maximum security” prison and fled the country. Jerry Dean had been sentenced to 20 years in prison last year for making Mandrax in a privatised Maputo plastics factory, Plasmex.
But there is a growing concern that Anibalzinho was only released in order to meet his death, since powerful interests feared that, in the forthcoming trial, he would “open his mouth and reveal who really ordered the assassination of Carlos Cardoso”, wrote João Machado da Graca, a prominent journalist, and close friend of Cardoso, in a column in Vertical. “We want Anibalzinho alive and well so that he can appear at the trial and tell all that he knows about who wanted to see Carlos Cardoso dead,” declared Machado da Graca.
Mozambique’s crusading and outspoken attorney general, Joaquim Madeira, said on Radio Mozambique on Monday night that the escape shows that “the system is really sick. In my opinion it’s a national disgrace.” In a report to Parliament in March, Madeira highlighted corruption in the prison system and the way in which prison guards help people to escape. In the same speech, he complained about the unwillingness of some ministers to cooperate with corruption investigations.
Five people remain in prison in the Cardoso case. Former bank manager Vicente Ramaya and two businessmen who run a currency exchange house, Ayob Abdul Satar and Momade Assife Abdul Satar, are accused of being involved in a $14-million bank fraud in 1996 where the investi- gation had been effectively thwarted. Cardoso was pushing to reopen the investigation, and they are accused of ordering his murder to stop him writing about the case.
Also in jail are Carlos Rachid Cassamo and Manuel Fernandes, said to be members of the hit squad along with Anibalzinho.