CARDOSO MURDER:
FRANGOULIS DENIES HOUSE ARREST

Maputo, 29 Nov (AIM) - The former head of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), Antonio Frangoulis, on Friday denied that he had ever placed the brothers Ayob and Momade Assife Abdul Satar under house arrest.

The Satars are among the six people accused of murdering Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, on 22 November 2000.

Momade Satar ("Nini") has repeatedly claimed that Frangoulis was party to a plot to extort a million US dollars from him, and this was the real reason for his arrest in March 2001.

He alleges that in early March, Frangoulis came to the Satar house with one of the alleged extortioners, a man named Jawed, and ordered that the two brothers could not leave the premises.

Frangoulis told the court that Jawed was used as a go-between. "When my colleagues said we had to distract the Satars, we used Jawed", he said. "And Jawed was the person the Satars used to contact us".

PIC was worried that the Satars might realise they were suspects, and might attempt to flee the country. But the PIC response, Frangoulis said, was not to decree house arrest, but to keep the two brothers under surveillance.

Two police vehicles, with plain clothes officers, were kept parked outside the Satars' house, one pointing in each direction, and were to follow either of the brothers whenever they left. If they made for the South African or Swazi border, they were to be stopped there.

Ayob Satar's lawyer, Domingos Arouca, claimed that on that very night in March 2001, he had tried to visit the house, only to be stopped by police officers who told him that, on the orders of Frangoulis, nobody was allowed to enter or leave.

Frangoulis denied this, and pointed out that Ayob Satar's company, the Unicambios foreign exchange bureau, was also under surveillance, which would have made no sense if the two brothers were unable to leave the house.

He thought Arouca was confusing the initial police surveillance with the arrest of the two brothers a few days later. Then uniformed police officers were indeed put on the door with instructions not to let anyone in, in order to ensure that there could be no tampering with any evidence.

Much of the day's session was taken up with accusations from the defence lawyers that the initial confession to the crime from Manuel Fernandes ("Escurinho") had been forced out of him by police threats.

Judge Augusto Paulino did not see how this line of questioning could be at all productive. Fernandes was on record as confessing to taking part in the crime, and then retracting his confession. But when he was interrogated in court last week, he freely confessed for a second time (albeit with some details that were different from the first confession).

But the lawyers insisted, and Paulino admitted questions on the matter to both Frangoulis and to Joaquim Dungano, the PIC officer who had first interrogated Fernandes.

Frangoulis categorically denied taking Fernandes away from the prison to threaten him at night at the Costa do Sol beach, or in Boane district, to the west of the city.

Apart from visiting the crime scene with Fernandes (when he helped the police reconstruct the murder), the only times Frangoulis had taken him out of the prison were in March 2001 to Matola in an attempt to identify the house of Carlitos Rashid, the man who fired the shots that took Cardoso's life.

Fernandes said he knew where Rashid lived, but when Frangoulis took him there at night, he was unable to identify the house. Only the following day, in broad daylight, was Fernandes able to tell Frangoulis exactly where Rashid lived.

Dungano also denied using any force or threats against Fernandes. He said that during the interrogation, Fernandes initially denied all knowledge of the murder, and "replied vaguely, talking of matters not related to the case".

But PIC already had evidence tying Fernandes to the crime, "As the discussion continued, we let it slip that we had evidence linking him to the murder", said Dungano, "and eventually he told us he was willing to confess.

"He said he was afraid of reprisals from his fellow accused, and asked to be transferred to another prison", said Dungano.

"There was no torture of any sort", he said. "It's not true that we took him out of the prison".

Furthermore, the legal requirements were satisfied. Fernandes had not told PIC whether he had a lawyer, and so PIC appointed one of its own officers as an "official defender".

These proceedings dragged on for much longer than necessary since several of the defence lawyers seemed unfamiliar with the case file. They irritated the judge by raising questions, the answers to which are contained in the case file.

The file is extremely long, running to many thousands of pages. But lawyers are paid to master such files. Paulino pointed out that they should have had thorough knowledge of the case before the trial started.
(AIM) pf/ (837)