Criminal Police Lack Basic Equipment For Investigation

Mozambique’s Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) lacks the basic equipment required for fighting organized crime such as trafficking in people.At a lecture in Maputo on Monday on “The Phenomenon of People Trafficking”, held as part of Legality Week, Maputo prosecutor Ana Marrengula said that providing better resources and working conditions for PIC, and advancing with legal reform that would allow special investigation techniques, are among the steps required for dealing with traffickers.She recalled a recent denunciation of trafficking in children in the southern provinces of Gaza and Inhambane, who were to be used as child labour. “Because the case was complex, bearing in mind that we were dealing with a more or less sophisticated network, we requested basic technological resources to start the investigation”, she said.One of the items prosecutors requested was a hidden camera to allow surveillance of the trafficking network, “but the response we received from PIC was that they did not possess such resources”, said Marrengula.Statistical data on people trafficking in Mozambique is scanty, but there is enough evidence to conclude that the crime is characterized by taking the victims, mostly girls, out of rural areas, and luring them to towns where they are submitted to forced labour or prostitution.There has been a steady trickle of people trafficking cases entering the Mozambican courts. Marrengula said that 38 cases were begun in 2014. Charges were laid in 13 of these cases, in nine there was insufficient evidence to pursue the cases, and the remaining 16 are still under investigation.The most lethal form of trafficking is that in which the victims are murdered and their body parts removed for use in black magic ritials. Marrengula said there had been two such cases in 2014 in the central province of Zambezia, in Milange and Lugela districts. The organs removed were liver, kidneys, heart and genitals.Involved in these crimes, said Marengula, were certain traders, peasants, unemployed people and witch-doctors.

Abdul Carimo, the former director of the government’s Legal Reform Technical Unit (UTREL), stressed that it is impossible to pursue certain investigations (into people trafficking, kidnapping, drug trafficking and trafficking in influence, for example) without using wire taps. 

He recalled that, back in 2011, he had drawn up draft legislation on phone tapping, but there had been no follow-up.Within the administration of justice, Carimo accused, there is lack of coordination and resistance to change. “We don’t all speak with the same voice”, he said. “If we did, these alterations would already have been approved”.Carimo was also scathing about the new Penal Code, approved by the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, last year. He said it was full of “imprecisions”, which made implementation of the code difficult. The code needed urgent correction, he argued, to eliminate anything inexact, particularly with regard to one of its major innovations, the use of alternatives to prison, such as community service.Part of the problem derives from the failure of the Assembly’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Commission to consult with UTREL. UTREL had drawn up its own draft of a new Penal Code, but the Commission took no notice and pressed ahead with a redraft of its own.A new Penal Procedural Code is due to be discussed in the Assembly between now and December 2016. Carimo suggested that the Assembly should learn from the past and consult with other institutions about the new code.