FRANGOULIS DENIES POLICE ACCUSATION

Antonio Frangoulis, the former head of the Maputo City branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), and now a parliamentary candidate for the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), has denied claims by the spokesperson of the General Command of the police, Pedro Cossa, that he fired six shots in the clash between supporters of the MDM and of the ruling Frelimo Party in the town of Macia, in the southern province of Gaza, on 20 September.Asked to comment on Tuesday about the failure of the police to protect the motorcade of MDM leader and presidential candidate Daviz Simango from Frelimo attack, Cossa claimed that Frangoulis fired six times “after a motorcade of that party became involved in acts of violence with a Frelimo motorcade”.

Reports from the journalists accompanying Simango indicated that the violence was started by the Frelimo supporters, and that Simango’s personal bodyguards intervened to protect him. The AIM reporter with the Simango motorcade heard eight shots fired into the air by a bodyguard.Frangoulis, who was with Simango, denied that he had fired the shots. Interviewed in Thursday’s issue of the independent newsheet “Mediafax”, he reacted to Cossa’s accusation with a well-known proverb “When the monkey doesn’t know how to dance, he says the floor is crooked”.

Frangoulis (pictured, left Simango the candidate) believed that the inclusion of his name in the police account of the Macia events was because senior figures in the police had long been persecuting him. “There are people in the police who have an appetite for denigrating Antonio Frangoulis”, he said. “That is their goal. Simply this – to denigrate my image”. Frangoulis shot to fame when he took charge of the investigations into the murder of the country’s finest investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, in November 2000. It was to a large extent thanks to Frangoulis that the six murderers were arrested, tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. 

But during these investigations, he was sometimes in open conflict with the then interior minister, Almerino Manhenje. After leaving the police force, he became a law lecturer, and he was elected to the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on the Frelimo ticket, in 2004. He was not reselected for the subsequent election, in 2009. Frangoulis became increasingly critical both of the leadership of the police force and of Frelimo, expressing these criticisms in his frequent television appearances. This year he publicly switched his political allegiance, and is again running for parliament, but this time on the MDM ticket. He is the most senior Frelimo figure to defect to the MDM.

Frangoulis told “Mediafax” that his opponents in the police were afraid that, once in parliament on the MDM benches, he would be the voice of those police officers critical of the current leadership. “They know that I’m on the path to the Assembly of the Republic, and that once I’m in the Assembly, I will be a spokesperson for the weak”, he said. “Even now, I am receiving information about the rottenness and problems within the police”.“I have my ideas and I shall continue to defend them”, he said. If Frelimo did not understand that there must be significant changes, then it would be heading for “a political cataclysm”.

As for the role of the police in the clashes between the Frelimo and the MDM, Frangoulis said that the police had always been informed in advance of the route being taken by Simango’s motorcade “but they’re not there”. The MDM had been met with hostile Frelimo crowds in both Maputo and Gaza provinces, “but the police did almost nothing”.One might even think, he added, that the police had informed Frelimo of Simango’s route, because everywhere Simango went, he found Frelimo groups there in advance, waiting to obstruct his progress. He accused the police leadership of being “completely subservient” to Frelimo.