Maputo - Mozambican Interior Minister Jaime Monteiro announced on Thursday that police have asked their counterparts in the region for help in tracking down the killers of one of the country’s top constitutional lawyers, Gilles Cistac, who was assassinated in front of a café in central Maputo on Tuesday.
He told a media conference that all branches of the police force, including the frontier guard and the coast guards, were involved in the hunt for the assassins.
The mention of the frontier guards indicates that the police take seriously the possibility that the death squad might try to flee to South Africa.
Echoing the promise made by President Filipe Nyusi on the day of the murder, Monteiro pledged that the police would not rest until the assassins were caught.
“Cost what it may, we must find the authors of this crime,” he declared, adding that police were following up eyewitnesses and clues from the bullets used in the shooting.
Monteiro also said the police “count on support from all quarters of Mozambican society and from our international partners. We are working in concert with the region and with our international police.”
But a very different message came from the central city of Beira, where the police banned a peaceful demonstration by university students and staff who wished to protest against the murder and pay tribute to the memory of Cistac.
Students and lecturers gathered in the morning for the march, only to be confronted with a large number of heavily armed police officers.
Demonstrations and marches in Mozambique do not require authorisation, but the law states that the organisers must notify the local authorities in advance. The students said they obeyed the law by notifying the Beira Municipal Council and local police.
The police refused to give any credible explanation for their action.
The leadership of the ruling Frelimo Party has reacted angrily to suggestions in some of the anti-government media that Frelimo was involved in the murder.
On Wednesday, the virulently anti-Frelimo weekly Canal de Mocambique called Frelimo “assassins” on its front page.
The Frelimo Political Commission issued a statement condemning “the barbaric and cowardly assassination” and roundly denying that the party or its leadership had anything to do with it.
Foreign Service