(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Mozambican authorities to protect Jeremias Langa, news director of the privately-owned television station Soico TV (STV). On 27 January 2005, the journalist was kidnapped at gunpoint in Maputo. He was held briefly and threatened with “the same fate as journalist Carlos Cardoso if [he] continued to talk too […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Mozambican authorities to protect Jeremias Langa, news director of the privately-owned television station Soico TV (STV). On 27 January 2005, the journalist was kidnapped at gunpoint in Maputo. He was held briefly and threatened with “the same fate as journalist Carlos Cardoso if [he] continued to talk too much.” Cardoso was killed in 2000.
Langa was previously attacked and threatened by armed men in October 2004. The police investigation into that incident was inconclusive. This latest incident came just a few days after one of Cardoso’s convicted killers was returned to prison.
“Violence against the press and impunity for the perpetrators [of attacks] should finally be a thing of the past. But to achieve this goal, the Mozambican authorities must take this attack seriously rather than finding excuses for not carrying out an immediate investigation,” RSF said.
Langa said he was attacked by two unidentified “black men in their 30s” in the Maputo suburb of Malhangalene, on the evening of 27 January. The assailants threatened the journalist with their pistols and got into his car with him. One of his attackers took the wheel while the other kept his gun pointed at Langa in the back seat.
“You talk too much,” said the man, pointing his gun at Langa. “You’re a journalist who talks too much. You are going to be given a lesson that will make you shut up. You are going to die like Carlos Cardoso.”
Langa told RSF that he made an effort to say nothing in reply and to keep calm. “You are saying nothing, but you talk too much on your TV station,” his assailants kept saying during the half hour that the abduction lasted. They finally threw him out of the car as they passed a restaurant a few kilometres from the city centre. Displaying their pistols one last time, they said, “Say anything at all and you’ll be killed.”
In the October incident, Langa was accosted by three men, two of whom were armed, as he approached his car after leaving his office. One of the assailants said to him, “Journalist bastard, we’ll get you!” Langa told RSF that the police took no action at the time and, when he enquired, they told him they had “misplaced the complaint.”
Langa said he did not know the precise motives for these attacks, but assumed his frequent on-air comments of a political nature during interviews with Mozambican personalities on STV could expose him to reprisals.
