Last week’s blasts at the Malhazine armoury in Mozambique were due to a robbery that went wrong, military sources told an independent newspaper on Monday. In its Monday edition, Tribuna Fax, quoting anonymous military sources, said the blasts came after officials, who were stealing mercury, failed to tightly close containers.
The death toll in Thursday’s explosions at a Maputo armoury has reached 100 while about 500 people were injured. Mozambique Health Minister Ivo Garrido said the number could increase as some victims were still in critical condition at Maputo central hospital.
Thousands of people fled their homes in Maputo on Friday, fearing fresh explosions from the smoking wreckage of Mozambique’s largest armoury as emergency workers stockpiled bodies and missile shells. Ninety-six people died in the explosions on Thursday evening and about 400 were injured.
The death toll from blasts at a military armoury in Mozambique’s capital Maputo triggered by high temperatures had risen to 72, Health Minister Ivo Paulo Garido said on Friday. The blasts began on Thursday. President Armando Guebuza called off a visit to South Africa on Friday because of the disaster.
Buildings in the Maputo city centre shook on Thursday afternoon as Mozambique’s national armoury went up in smoke for the second time since 1985, Vista News reported. Windows were shattered at the University of Eduardo Mondlane’s students’ canteen on Paul S Kankhomba Avenue.
More than 18-million cubic metres of wood are indiscriminately cut down in Mozambique, mainly for firewood, each year, Vista News reported on Thursday. This was according to a report presented on Thursday by Mario Falcao, a researcher at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, at a debate on the state of the country’s forests held in Maputo.
Thousands of people living in the coastal towns and cities of Mozambique have been displaced by Indian Ocean high sea tides that swept into residential and commercial areas this week, news reports said on Thursday. The same phenomenon had sent massive waves slamming into the South African coastline earlier this week.
More than 20 Mozambican drug mules serving time in Brazil will soon be transferred to finish their sentences in Mozambique, thanks to the recent approval of a prison transfer agreement, Vista News reported on Tuesday. This was revealed by Justice Minister Esperanca Machavela in an interview published this week.
Sandra Alberto was heavily pregnant when Cyclone Favio struck Mozambique earlier this month, ripping the zinc roof off the house she and her two children had taken refuge in. "I grabbed hold of my children because I thought the wind would blow them away," she said. "Roofs and other objects were flying all over the place."
A Mozambican NGO has managed to collect more than 800Â 000 weapons used in the country’s 16-year civil war, Vista News reported on Tuesday. This was revealed by the head of the Mozambican Christian Council’s Transforming Swords into Ploughshares project, Bishop Dinis Sengulane, in a report published by Radio Mozambique.
Press freedom improved in Mozambique in 2006 as compared with previous years, a new human rights report has found, Vista News said on Wednesday. The report, released on Wednesday in Maputo, said that while media institutions reported that freedom of speech and the press had improved, police continued to harass journalists in 2006.
South Africa has made available three helicopters to help transport provisions and to monitor refugee centres accommodating flood victims in the Zambezi Valley, Vista News reported on Monday. Radio Mozambique said the helicopters were expected to arrive in Caia district, more than 1Â 000km north of Maputo, on Tuesday.
Mozambican marines rescued more than 1Â 700 people, including 900 children, from flooding in central Mozambique on Friday. The marines used eight boats to mount the rescue operation in the central town of Buzi in the province of Sofala, where at least 28Â 000 people have been affected by the floods.
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/ 28 February 2007
Mozambique registered a rise of 15% in the number of people who died of the disease last year, news reports said on Wednesday. Health Ministry spokesperson Martinhio Djedje said more than six-million cases of the disease were reported in the country’s public health centres last year.
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/ 25 February 2007
A huge clean-up operation was under way on Saturday in some of Mozambique’s most popular resorts as the Southern African nation’s fledgling tourist industry struggled to recover from a devastating cyclone, casualties of which appeared to be limited thanks to a warning system and evacuations, with initial reports of 10 dead.
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/ 24 February 2007
At least three people were killed and dozens injured in the tourist resort of Vilankulo when a tropical cyclone slammed into Mozambique’s southern coast this week, the National Emergency Operations Centre and the Red Cross said on Friday. ”Most of the buildings have been destroyed,” a Red Cross officer said.
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/ 23 February 2007
Emergency workers on Friday surveyed damage to areas of Mozambique left devastated by Cyclone Favio, which left at least three people dead, scores injured and flattened most of the worst-hit town. Red Cross spokesperson Tapiwa Gomo said he had received differing reports that three or four people had been killed in and around the town of Vilankulo.
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/ 22 February 2007
Roofs were blown off, trees uprooted and power lines cut by the force of a tropical cyclone that slammed into coastal regions of already-beleaguered Mozambique on Thursday, officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties after Cyclone Favio made landfall in the Southern African nation.
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/ 22 February 2007
Cyclone Favio, sweeping in after wreaking havoc in Madagascar, made landfall at Vilankulo in Mozambique on Thursday morning. Tshepho Ngobeni, marine forecaster at the South African weather service, told the Mail & Guardian Online that the storm had average wind speeds of about 176km/h, with gusts of up to 246km/h.
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/ 20 February 2007
A tropical cyclone was moving on Monday toward Mozambique, where about 40 people have already died in flooding caused by heavy rains. Cyclone Flavio, located on Monday morning in the Mozambique Channel about 200km off the coast, was moving inland at a rate of 12kph.
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/ 19 February 2007
Mozambique’s national disaster agency, already struggling to get food and clean water to thousands of victims of flooding, warned on Monday the worst could be yet to come as the rainy season gets under way. Paulo Zucula, the country’s top disaster official, said there was only one helicopter working to bring relief supplies to people stranded in isolated evacuation centres.
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/ 13 February 2007
The United Nations’ World Food Programme started handing out food aid on Tuesday to about 6 000 flood-hit Mozambicans and said their needs could become more desperate. Officials said the flooding of the Zambezi river had compounded food woes in the Southern African country where thousands were already in need of aid.
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/ 12 February 2007
Soldiers and relief workers using helicopters and canoes have evacuated about 60 000 people from the flooded Zambezi River Valley in central Mozambique, where more than 100 000 others are at risk, officials said on Monday.
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/ 9 February 2007
Chinese leader Hu Jintao on Friday left Mozambique for the Seychelles, the last stop on an African swing marked by Beijing’s largesse and staunch rebuttal of criticism that it was plundering the continent. Hu on Thursday announced a debt waiver, cash grants and increased market access for goods from war-ravaged Mozambique.
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/ 9 February 2007
Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday announced a debt waiver, cash grants, increased market access and ”pragmatic cooperation” with war-ravaged Mozambique on the last major stop of his current African tour. Hu signed a slew of cooperation agreements and announced that Beijing was waiving Mozambique’s bilateral debt.
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/ 8 February 2007
Mozambican Prime Minister Luisa Diogo on Thursday warned that heavy rains lashing the country could soon fuel an emergency and wreak more havoc than heavy floods in 2001 when nearly 1Â 000 people died. ”It’s really a dramatic situation and there is a possibility of emergency,” she told reporters.
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/ 27 January 2007
A donation by South Africa of military surplus equipment to Mozambique came at the right time for the country — two work boats will be used to save people left stranded by floods. About 43Â 000 people are stranded in western Mozambique after heavy rains and floods in the area.
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/ 23 January 2007
Flooding has killed at least 44 people and forced thousands of others in Angola and Mozambique to flee their homes, officials in the Southern African nations said on Tuesday. Most of the deaths occurred in and around Angola’s capital, Luanda, which was pelted by torrential rains last week.
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/ 20 January 2007
Foreign powers cannot "impose" political or economic solutions on Zimbabwe even though the deepening crisis in the African nation threatens to destabilise its neighbours, a senior Mozambique official said on Friday. "Each time you try to impose a solution from the outside, the results most of the time are not what we like," said Henrique Banze, Mozambique’s Deputy Foreign Minister.
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/ 18 January 2007
Torrential rains have destroyed more than 1 000 houses, leaving more than 6 000 people homeless in northern Mozambique, officials said on Thursday. A statement by the government’s relief agency said 13 classrooms have also been swept away by the rain, and a further 150 houses are at risk of collapse.
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/ 11 January 2007
The contradictions in Maria’s life are typical of many women in Mozambique. On one level the 33-year-old is advancing. She is able to attend night school to gain the education that the 16-year-long civil war interrupted when she was a child. She has learnt to sew to complement the money she makes as a trader. She is trying to take the necessary steps to ”live positively” after finding out that she has contracted HIV.
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/ 23 December 2006
A motley group of about 20 Mozambican men and women eyed each other tentatively as they met for the first time to discuss how they could jointly fight HIV/Aids. On one side of the table were doctors, nurses and counsellors. On the other side sat traditional healers, or cureindeiros as they are known in Mozambique.