Four of the five gunmen who yesterday murdered Anastácio Matavele, an electoral observation leader in Gaza, are agents of the Special Operations Group of the of the riot police, the spokesperson for the General Command of the police, Orlando Mudumane, admitted at a Maputo press conference this morning.
Unlike some previous high profile murders, the assassins failed to make a clean getaway. As they were racing away from the scene, O Pais reports today they began to be chased by local police, apparently unaware of their identify, and as the gunmen raced away they entered the N1 main road at high speed and crashed into other cars. Two of the killers died in the crash, and two others, one of them seriously injured, were taken into police custody. The fifth made his escape and is on the run. Thus, for the first time, the involvement of the police could not be denied.
Opposition parties and civil society have alleged that death squads exist in Mozambique, and Mudumane effectively admitted they were right.
Questions will now be raised about similar unsolved murders. The Franco-Mozambican constitutional lawyer, Gilles Cistac, was gunned down in central Maputo in March 2015 in a very similar drive-by shooting. He had no obvious enemies but was challenging the government’s claim that Afonso Dhlakama’s decentralization proposals were unconstitutional. Eventually the decentralization laws agreed by government and adopted by parliament were very close to Dhlakama’s proposals. AIM also points to the totally mysterious murder on the Costa do Sol beach in October 2016 of Jeremias Pondeca, a senior figure in Renamo and a member of the Council of State, a body that advises the President.
Anastacio Matavele, a prominent civil society voice in Gaza, was leading civil society election observation in Gaza and was killed when he left a training session of election observers in Xai-Xai. Gaza province is hostile to the opposition and civil society, and in past elections observation by civil society and opposition parties has been partially blocked. This year Gaza is a special target for observation because of the claim to have registered 300,000 more voters than there are voting age adults. Opposition candidates have been attacked by Frelimo supporters recently.
Four of the fives gunmen were members of the Gaza branch of the Special Operations Group of the riot police (Grupo de Operações Especiais – GOE – da Unidade de Intervenção Rápida – UIR). The provincial police commanders of GOE and UIR were both suspended, and an internal inquiry commission has been set up, Mudumane said.
