Residents of Namarecua village, in the district of Montepuez in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, have beaten to death their community leader because they believed that he was spreading cholera.According to the daily paper “O Pais”, Fatima Constantino explained that her husband, Luis Pedro, had just returned from Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado, where he had attended a meeting with the provincial governor Eliseu Machava, when a crowd stormed her house. Constantino said that the crowd accused her husband of having brought from the meeting with the governor products that spread cholera. They tied up her husband and took him to the village where they beat him to death.A climate of fear and mistrust hangs over the village. The head of village, Arcanjo Salimo, claims to have narrowly escaped a lynching because he was away from home. “I decided to sleep in the fields. Now I am thinking about moving away because I can no longer live here” said Salimo.The provincial health director, Mussa Agy, said that the wave of disinformation about cholera and the deaths resulting from it are partly due to a lack of coordination between the village structures and the health sector in the region.The district commander of the Mozambican Police, Paulo Silva, has announced that 15 people have been arrested in connection with the murder.In December a number of people died from acute diarrhoea and vomiting in the districts of Montepuez and Ancuabe in Cabo Delgado. This has been blamed on individuals preventing patients from reaching the hospital.This is not the first case of murder resulting from disinformation about cholera, particularly in the north of Mozambique. Disinformation campaigns have led to violence, the murder or attempted murder of health staff and Red Cross activists, and the destruction of health posts and the equipment they contain
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