14 CASES OF KIDNAPPING IN 2012 – ATTORNEY-GENERAL

The Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office in 2012 registered a total of 14 cases of kidnapping followed by ransom demands,In his annual report to the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, delivered on Wednesday, Attorney-General Augusto Paulino said that currently 21 people are under arrest in connection with these cases. Paulino attributed the kidnappings to organised crime. He noted that the criminals selected their victims carefully, in order to extract large sums of money through blackmailing and threatening the victims and their relatives. Associated with the kidnappings were transactions of large sums of money, either in cash, or through bank transfers to accounts in other countries. The ransoms demanded have been as large as eight million US dollars.Paulino announced that prosecutors and agents of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) have been allocated to work exclusively on the kidnappings and ransoms. Paulino also expressed serious concern at the trafficking in people, particularly for purposes of extracting human body parts, often used for witchcraft. He said his office recorded 30 cases of human trafficking in 2012, compared with 24 the previous year. Charges have been laid in 15 cases, six of which have come to trial. In addition to the removal of human organs, the cases of trafficking also involved forced labour and prostitution and debt servitude. Paulino said that cooperation with neighbouring countries, notably South Africa, has been advantageous in locating and supporting the victims of trafficking, and tracking down the criminals. The number of cases of mob justice, in which crowds took the law into their own hands and lynched suspected criminals, declined from 20 in 2011 to 14 in 2012. Most of these cases had occurred in central Mozambique – six in Zambezia province and six in Sofala. Paulino described lynching as a form of “contempt for reason and for the dignity due to all human beings”. He said preventive measures have been taken to halt these practices “but their occurrence remains a matter of concern, particularly in the city of Beira”.Turning to crimes of corruption, Paulino warned that large sums of money had been repeatedly siphoned out of certain public institutions, with enormous losses to the Mozambican state, which had to mobilize additional resources to replace what had been stolen. Such thefts, he said, took the form of duplicating wage sheets, paying wages to employees who did not exist, paying allowances to people who were not entitled to them, or paying travel expenses for more days than the trip actually took.The current indication of the cost of these fraudulent practices in 2012 is that the state lost 62.9 million meticais (about 2.1 million US dollars), of which only 17.4 million meticais and two motor-cycles had so far been recovered.Measures taken to combat the theft of state funds, Paulino said, included boosting and expanding the electronic State Financial Administration System (e-SISTAFE), and strengthening the internal and external audits of public institutions.As for the clashes in early April in the small town of Muxungue, in Sofala, in which armed members of the former rebel movement Renamo, murdered four members of the riot police, Paulino said that nothing justifies such violence. Criminal cases are now underway against 14 people, one of whom is still hospitalized. All are believed to be members of Renamo.Paulino called for restraint on the part of all political actors so that they do not incite their followers to violence. The figures given by Paulino showed a decline of 3.3 per cent in the number of crimes registered by the police – there were 41,228 crimes recorded in 2011, and 39,861 cases recorded in 2012. The number of citizens detained in connection with these crimes, however, had risen – from 9.473 in 2011 to 13,912 in 2012. 108 firearms were seized, compared with only 83 in 2011. More than a third of all crimes took place in Maputo city (8,364 cases) and Maputo province (7,814).Paulino called on the Assembly to strengthen Mozambican legislation against poaching. He noted that while in South Africa poachers were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, in Mozambique they get away with fines regardless of how much elephant ivory or rhino horns they are caught with.The impact of poaching on Mozambican wild life is devastating. The latest reports indicate that every single rhinoceros in the Limpopo National Park in Gaza province has been killed. In the country’s largest conservation area, the Niassa Reserve, in the far north, around 2,500 elephants have been slaughtered over the past two years.