(RSF/IFEX) – In letters addressed to Justice Minister José Ibraimo Abudo and Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje, RSF expressed its concern about recent developments in the investigation into the death of Carlos Cardoso. RSF called on the two ministers to guarantee access by the victim’s family’s lawyer to the file, as provided for in the Mozambican […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In letters addressed to Justice Minister José Ibraimo Abudo and Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje, RSF expressed its concern about recent developments in the investigation into the death of Carlos Cardoso. RSF called on the two ministers to guarantee access by the victim’s family’s lawyer to the file, as provided for in the Mozambican Penal Procedure Code. The organisation also called on the Mozambican authorities to immediately bring the suspects before the examining magistrate, to guarantee their safety, to communicate in a transparent way and to guarantee that all media can access official information.
According to information gathered by RSF, on 28 February 2001, the interior minister announced at a press conference, to which “Mediafax” and “Metical” were not invited, that some suspects had been arrested. On 2 March, the Swaziland press published an article on the cicumstances in which three Mozambican “illegal immigrants” had been arrested by Swaziland police and taken to the Mozambican border. They were immediately arrested by the Mozambican police, who suspect them of being involved in Cardoso’s murder. On 4 March, the official weekly “Domingo” published an article disclosing the identity and the circumstances of the arrest of two men, suspected of being the journalist’s murderers. The weekly gave many details and reproduced the Mozambican and Portuguese passports which one of the suspects was carrying at the time of his arrest. This shows that the newspaper gained access to confidential information, while the lawyer still did not have access to the file.
The number and identity of the people detained in the investigation are still not known. According to “Domingo”, two suspects, Carlos Pinto da Cruz and Manuel Fernandes, were arrested in Swaziland. These names do not match those revealed by the Swazi press a few days earlier. By 8 March, none of the presumed suspects, who had been detained for more than a week, had been brought before the examining magistrate, in violation of the law which stipulates that nobody can be detained for more than forty-eight hours by the police without being brought before an examining magistrate. Pinto da Cruz, a petty criminal known to the police, has allegedly often benefited from police protection in the recent past.
On 22 November 2000, Cardoso, the director of “Metical”, who headed the official news agency from 1980 to 1988 and launched “Mediafax”, the first independent newspaper in the early 1990s, was shot dead, close to “Metical”‘s office. His driver was severely wounded in the incident. Cardoso had received death threats. He had been working on stories on bankruptcy and corruption cases. On 21 December, RSF wrote to the Mozambican authorities, noting serious irregulatrities in the preliminary investigation.
