Mozambican authorities’ apparent reluctance to investigate $400-million in bank frauds and at least three related assassinations became clearer this week as more evidence emerged about Anibal Antonio ”Anibalzinho” dos Santos Jnr, the man accused of murdering newsman Carlos Cardoso.
Anibalzinho escaped from Maputo’s maximum security prison on September 1.
Soon after the escape President Joaquim Chissano said Interpol had been alerted. But on September 10 Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, said no request had been received for a ”red notice” asking for Anibalzinho’s capture.
His escape appears to have spurred a frightened and quiescent Mozambican press into action. The Sunday newspaper Domingo last week reported that in the month before Anibalzinho escaped, two convicted murderers escaped from the same maximum security prison. At least one of the two is linked to a local bank fraud scandal. The newspaper reported that one had been involved in killing Lima Felix, a bank official assassinated when he discovered money laundering.
Reports also alleged that Anibalzinho and the other two escapees appear to have been able to leave prison periodically, presumably for personal and criminal activities.
Independent weekly Savana reported that Anibalzinho’s mother claimed to be negotiating ”with people in the government” for her son’s release and free passage abroad.
Savana also reported that in December last year Anibalzinho wrote to the governing Frelimo party and to the attorney general offering a deal in which he would not reveal the role in the Cardoso murder of ”people linked to Frelimo”.
In the letter he said he had given names to Antonio Frangoulis, then head of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), who was leading the investigation, the newspaper reported.
Frangoulis confirmed the existence of the letter and that Anibalzinho had given him names of high level people, but no proof of their involvement.
Frangoulis said after Anibalzinho gave him information he was marginalised. In June this year he was taken off the case and dismissed as head of the PIC.
Anibalzinho, in his December letter to Frelimo, wrote: ”I understand that Dr Frangoulis has been relieved of his duties.”
This week Frangoulis said: ”They [the prisoners] got the news before it reached me. At that time I was already being marginalised, a process that culminated in my removal from office, which I only knew about in June.”
The Mozambique news agency AIM reports that ”the inescapable conclusion is that a prison inmate accused of murder knew more about what was really going on inside the Ministry of the Interior than the head of the Maputo PIC”.
In its reports Domingo claims that the person who has taken over from Frangoulis, Germano Parruque, ”is one of the people who created most obstacles in the investigation of the murder of Carlos Cardoso”. The newspaper also called for the immediate dismissal of Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje.
Domingo is seen as being close to Armando Guebuza, Frelimo’s secretary general and the party’s candidate for president in 2004. There is no love lost between Guebuza and Chissano, and questions are being asked about how far Guebuza will go to protect corrupt people close to Chissano, in the interests of maintaining party unity.
Sources close to the Cardoso murder case say several avenues of investigation were blocked at high level. Links to certain high-level people could not be pursued, nor could links to a large scandal in Banco Austral, which Cardoso was investigating when he was murdered.
But it is known that Frangoulis had made some progress in investigating Anibalzinho’s allegations of top-level connections before he was pulled off the case.
And there has been no Mozambican investigation of the assassination of the head of banking supervision, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, despite an initial investigation by South African police. He was murdered in August last year when he began to investigate the role of senior Frelimo people in the Banco Austral scandal.
Earlier this year several donors compiled a dossier of prima facie evidence of illegal action by senior people in Banco Austral and in the Bank of Mozambique (the central bank). But the government has taken no action, knowing that the international donors, including the World Bank, are afraid to embarrass Mozambique.
Three days before Anibalzinho’s escape, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was in Maputo and praised Mozambique as an African success story that has proved the Afro-pessimists wrong.
A UN-organised conference on corruption to take place in Maputo in October has been forced by the donors not to discuss high level scandals and only to deal with petty corruption.
The donor community may be following a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil line, but Mozambican journalists, shocked that their colleague’s alleged murderer has been allowed to escape, are finally turning up the heat.