Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Maputo City Law Court on Monday ordered the release of 12 supporters of former presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane, who had been held illegally on trumped-up charges for nine months.
According to a report in Tuesday’s issue of the independent electronic publication “Mozambique Times” (MT), the judge threw the case out after concluding that evidence had been tampered with. The court ruling against charging any of the defendants.
The case dates back to January, during the post-election protests, when police arrested 12 people in Marracuene district, about 30 kilometres north of Maputo. They included the writer Alex Nhambanga, who uses the pen name Alex Barga.
Also released was Mondlane’s financial assistant, Gloria Nobre. On his Facebook page, Mondlane declared that Nobre “is free of all the crimes of which she was illegally and falsely accused”.
The court could not see that the 12 had committed any crimes – but the Public Prosecutor’s Office accused them of “conspiracy to commit crimes against state security, violent alteration of the rule of law, and criminal association”.
One of the defence lawyers, Nelson Cossa, told MT that the real crimes had been committed by the prosecution. The court found that all the evidence marshalled by the prosecution had been gathered by unlawful means: this backfired, since the court reacted by throwing out the charges, declaring the entire indictment null and void.
Cossa said the investigators had carried out property seizures without warrants, accessed confidential banking documents without judicial authorisation, made arrests in homes without warrants, falsified dates in official records, conducted hearings without legal representation, and extracted confessions under torture.
The 12 had been arrested during the massive unrest that followed the announcement of the results from last October’s general elections, widely regarded as fraudulent. According to the official results, announced by the Constitutional Council, the candidate of the ruling Frelimo Party, Daniel Chapo, won, with more than 65 per cent of the vote, while Mondlane came second with 24 per cent.
Mondlane declared that, in reality, he had won – but neither Chapo nor Mondlane published the polling station results sheets (“editais”) which could have proved the case. The Constitutional Council tried to make the results more credible by transferring votes from Chapo to Mondlane. But it made no attempt to explain what it was doing and refused to order a full recount of the votes.
At Mondlane’s urging, thousands of his supporters took to the streets in protest at the results. They faced police repression in which over 500 people died, mostly from police bullets. Over 4,000 people were arrested, many of whom are still behind bars.
Interviewed by MT, Mondlane said “the police are being used by the regime as an instrument to persecute its opponents”.
“There was torture and even death threats,” Mondlane said. “This shows that those running the state are unfit for the democratic rule of law. We have a government hijacked by organised crime. The mafias have taken over the justice system, particularly the criminal investigation police.”
Nonetheless, Mondlane praised the ruling from the Maputo court. He said the judge “applied the law impartially to dismantle the charges”, describing this as “a major defeat for the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office”.
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