Police Violate Presumption of Innocence

16 June 2011

Maputo — The Mozambican police on Monday violated the constitutionally enshrined presumption of innocence by publicly displaying a man accused of ordering the murder of a child in the central city of Beira.

The man in question is a senior local government official, Chico Simao Chimuaza, the General Inspector of Beira City Council. The only evidence against him is a claim made by the confessed killer of the child, Daniel Sousa.

Sousa also spoke at the public meeting organised by the police, and seemed to have no regrets at all about murdering and decapitating a two year old child.

He said he had gone several times to Chimuaza’s house, asking for a job “since he is economically influential in the neighbourhood”.

On one of those occasions “he told me there was no job for me, but he wanted me to accept the challenge of seeking a child’s head, for which he would pay me 100,000 meticais (about 3,330 US dollars at current exchange rates)”.

Sousa did not ask why Chimuaza needed the head of a murdered child. He told the meeting “I needed the money. I asked for an advance but he said that, for reasons of lack of trust, he couldn’t give me anything. I had to bring the head and then I would receive the money”.

The police intercepted Sousa with his gruesome cargo while he was on his way to the Praia Nova area in central Beira, allegedly to meet Chimuaza. On the basis of the unsupported word of an apparently deranged killer, a local attorney ordered Chimuaza’s arrest.

To make matters much worse the police, despite Chimuaza’s angry protestations of innocence, put him on public display, in front of a large crowd, including television cameras, as if he had already been tried and convicted.

Chimuaza denied any contact with Sousa. “It’s a pure lie”, he declared. “Last week I was taken by the police and detained without knowing why. I don’t know anything about what that young man (Sousa) has just said. I’m innocent”.

“Where’s the justice in this country?”, Cimuaza exclaimed. “I know nothing, and this is all just a lie”.

The police claim that, after his detention last week, Chimuaza fainted when he was confronted with Sousa. When reporters asked him about his faint, Cimuaza replied “that’s got nothing to do with this accusation, but with another case that is still under investigation”.

This is not the first time that the police have accused citizens of complicity in gruesome murders on nothing more substantial than the word of those who admitted carrying out the deed.

The most notorious such case occurred in February 1999 when a man named Ossumane Amad Ali, accused of murder and decapitation, claimed that an imam at a Maputo mosque, Shafik Kadiwala, had asked him for a severed head.

There was never any evidence against Kadiwala (which did not prevent the Sunday paper “Domingo” from waging a libelous campaign against the imam). The then Attorney-General, Antonio Namburete suggested that Ossumane was a psychopath, of doubtful sanity. But it took intervention by the Supreme Court, a year later, to secure Kadiwala’s release and to quash the charges against him for lack of evidence.

The police in Beira should perhaps recall the words of the Supreme Court from February 2000: “To charge someone with a crime as serious as murder, on the sole basis of the untrustworthy version of a confessed criminal, opens the road to intolerable violations of the freedom and good name of innocent citizens”.

AllAfrica – All the Time