MOZAMBIQUE 142

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News reports & clippings no. 142 from Joseph Hanlon
7 December 2008 (j.hanlon@open.ac.uk)
This is an irregular service of news summaries.
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Cardoso killer
escapes again


Anibalzinho (Anibal dos Santos Junior ), the man who convicted of leading the death squad that murdered investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000, escaped from jail for the third time on Sunday morning.


He escaped from jail in 2002 and 2004, with help from people within the Ministry of Interior. The present Interior Minister, Jose Pacheco, accused the police of facilitating today's escape.


Escaping with Anibalzinho were two men who murdered police and a prison director. Thus the escape seems linked to an ongoing battle within the police, where some elements are directly linked to organised crime. This battle also seems linked to the detention since 22 September of former Interior Minister Almerinho Manhenje.


The full AIM story is below.


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AIM NEWS CAST, SUNDAY 7/12/2008
261208E CARDOSO MURDER: ASSASSIN ESCAPES AGAIN

Maputo, 7 Dec (AIM) – Mozambique’s most notorious assassin. Anibal dos Santos Junior (“Anibalzinho”), the man who led the death squad that murdered the country’s foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, in November 2000, escaped from his cell in the Maputo City Police Command on Sunday morning.

In this break-out he was accompanied by two other murderers, Custodio Luis de Jesus (“Todinho”) and Samuel Chavangueza (“Samito”). The former was one of those charged with the murder of the director of the Maputo Central Prison, Jorge Microsse, while “Samito” is an accomplice of Agostinho Chauque, wanted for a string of bank robberies and murders of police officers.

Interior Minister Jose Pacheco confirmed the escape to AIM, and accused the policemen on duty of facilitating the escape. The police guards on duty at the time of the escape have all been detained, said Pacheco, as have the men they relieved.

On Sunday afternoon, the Maputo city director of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), Dias Balate, told reporters that the escape had occurred in broad daylight, at about 10.00. The surprised reporters asked if Balate meant that the police only discovered the escape at 10.00.

“No. They escaped at 10.00”, he replied.

Balate said the murderers had knocked a hole in the prison wall, through which they had clambered. Inside one of the cells detectives had found a screwdriver, supposedly used by the three to chisel their way out.

Scraping through the wall with a screwdriver is no easy task. The walls are made of cement blocks 20 centimetres thick, and such a method of escape would be both noisy and extremely time-consuming. Obviously the escape was carefully planned, since the three men were supposed to be in separate cells. It is believed there was a car outside waiting for them.

Balate was less categorical than the minister about police connivance in the escape, and merely said that the six men on duty at the time are being questioned. He said that if there was evidence that police guards were involved, disciplinary and criminal proceedings would be started against them.

He said the police have started a manhunt to re-arrest the three, and urged all of Mozambican society to cooperate, and contact the police if they have any information as to the whereabouts of the killers.

Anibalzinho was arrested in February 2001 for his role in the murder of Carlos Cardoso. But in September 2002, shortly before the case came to trial, he escaped from the Maputo top security jail and slipped over the border into South Africa.

He was tried in absentia, and Judge Augusto Paulino (now the country’ Attorney-General), declaring that Anibalzinho was “an habitual delinquent”, sentenced him to 28 years and six months imprisonment.

The South African police managed to re-arrest and deport him, and he arrived in Maputo a few hours after Paulino’s verdict.

But the assassin escaped again from the same prison in May 2004. This time whoever facilitated his escape provided him with an air ticket to Canada. But at Toronto, the immigration authorities realized that Anibalzinho was traveling on a false passport and detained him. After a legal battle that lasted several months, he was deported, arriving back in Maputo under armed guard in January 2005. This time he was incarcerated in a cell in the City Police Command itself, in the optimistic belief that this was escape-proof.

Anibalzinho’s lawyer successfully called for a retrial. This tactic backfired, and in January 2006 the second judge to hear the case, Dimas Marroa, agreed with Paulino that Anibalzinho was “an habitual delinquent”, but increased his prison term to 30 years.

In her final statement at the end of this trial, the Cardoso family lawyer, Lucinda Cruz, pointed out that Anibalzinho is a Portuguese citizen, and suggested that he should be deported to Portugal to serve his sentence in a Portuguese prison, “so that we do not run the risk of him escaping from our own prisons a third time”.

This prescient warning was ignored, and the then Attorney-General, Joaquim Madeira, even attacked Cruz for making it. “Who says that Portuguese prisons are stronger than ours?”, asked Madeira, whose national pride had apparently been wounded by the eminently sensible proposal that a dangerous Portuguese criminal should be dumped in a Portuguese jail.

Contacted by AIM on Sunday, an angry Lucinda Cruz said that her position of 2006 had now been fully vindicated. “What I said would happen has happened”, she exclaimed. “He’s escaped and this danger is on the loose again”.
(AIM)
Pf/ (756)


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