Cardoso Murder: Nyimpine Chissano At Planning Meetings
Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
November 28, 2002
Maputo
The murder of Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, was plotted at meetings
where Nyimpine Chissano, oldest son of President Joaquim Chissano, was present, according to
notes that the former head of the Maputo branch of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC),
Antonio Frangoulis, took of a conversation he held with one of the accused, Maputo
money-lender Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini").
Frangoulis told the Maputo City Court on Thursday that he had spoken to Satar, at the latter's
request, in the top security prison, on 28 November 2001, and Satar had revealed the names of
those who ordered the murder.
Initially Frangoulis was reluctant to reveal details of this conversation, even when the judge,
Augusto Paulino, ordered him to do so. "My family has no protection", he said. "I would rather
that he (Satar) speak first, and I will confirm what he says or not".
Interrogated last week, Satar had already implicated Chissano Jr, saying that, at the request of
Chissano, he had made payments to Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the leader of the
death squad that murdered Cardoso.
Now Paulino asked him whether he had mentioned anyone else to Frangoulis, and Satar claimed
the only name he had mentioned was that of Nyimpine.
Frangoulis retorted "There's a moral obligation on Nini to tell the court of the meetings he knew
about, who was there, and where they were held".
But since Satar refused to do so, he would reveal the content of their discussion. Reaching for his
notes from the November 2001 meeting, Frangoulis said Nini had spoken of a meeting in June or
July 2000 held in the house of Maria Candida Cossa, an associate of Nyimpine Chissano, and one
of the people who owed large sums to the crippled Austral Bank.
Those present were Cossa, Nyimpine, Satar and a man named Nanai Pateguana. The discussion
focused on murder, but the target was not Cardoso. The conspirators wanted to eliminate the head
of the government's customs restructuring unit, Pedro Bule, who was making life tough for
smugglers, and had a major dispute with Nyimpine Chissano.
According to Frangoulis's notes, Satar had also claimed that Nyimpine and Octavio Muthemba,
the chairman of the Austral Bank board, wanted to kill Austral financial director, Koojambu
Mugathan, who had been appointed by the Malaysian majority shareholders in the bank.
Mugathan had requested the auditing company KPMG to look into the Austral credit portfolio,
which was in a disastrous state, with mountains of bad debt. The Malaysians had become tired of
their Mozambican partners authorising loans with no guarantee of repayment.
The KPMG report, delivered in January 2001, listed non- performing loans. Among them were
loans for almost three billion meticais (200,000 US dollars at the exchange rate of the time) owed
by Candida Cossa, and over 296 million meticais owed by Nyimpine Chissano.
But the plotters' priority, according to Satar, was to eliminate Pedro Bule. The assassination was
to be carried out in South Africa by "the soldiers of Anibalzinho".
The payment for the killing, discussed over two meetings, was set first at 200,000 dollars, then fell
to a million rands (about 100,000 dollars at current exchange rates, rather more in 2000).
Anibalzinho was dispatched to South Africa to plan the killing along with a South African named as
Rui Hosten.
But Bule returned to Maputo unexpectedly because of the death of his son, and the attention of the
plotters switched to Carlos Cardoso. Satar told Frangoulis that, at a September meeting in
Cossa's house, Nyimpine expressed his anger at articles in Cardoso's paper "Metical" concerning
himself and other members of the Chissano family, particularly one concerning the former Chinese
embassy. The embassy had moved, and the building was up for sale - it was believed that
Nyimpine Chissano was attempting to acquire it.
The "Metical" article, however, was not even written by Cardoso.
A former "Metical" reporter told AIM, "They think that because Cardoso was the editor, he wrote
everything in the paper". According to Satar, mediated through Frangoulis's notes, Cossa declared
"We must stop the Pedro Bule operation and eliminate Carlos Cardoso". For murdering Cardoso,
Nyimpine was allegedly willing to pay over two billion meticais.
Satar told Frangoulis that on the same day he went to Nanai Pataguana's house, to receive
400,000 dollars from a man named Abassamo which was to be transferred to Nyimpine
Chissano's London account.
After the murder, at a further meeting in Cossa's house, Anibalzinho admitted that he had used
Mozambican assassins to kill Cardoso, rather than the South Africans he had promised to recruit.
According to Satar, Nyimpine then gave Anibalzinho 45,000 dollars as payment to "eliminate" the
other members of the hit squad (Carlitos Rashid and Manuel Fernandes).
If this account is true, it was another instruction that Anibalzinho disobeyed, since Rashid and
Fernandes are alive, and have made full confessions implicating Nyimpine Chissano.
When Paulino asked Frangoulis why he had revealed none of this earlier, he said "I informed my
superiors, and their sensitivity to the matter was different from mine". Satar kept promising
Frangoulis proof, claiming for instance that tapes of the meetings existed. Satar was reluctant to tell
him where these tapes were since they incriminated him as well.
Frangoulis persisted, but "when I thought I was going to get the proof, I got the sack instead".
(Frangoulis was removed from his job inexplicably in July this year.) Paulino was irritated that this
was the first he had heard of Frangoulis's notes. "All this evidence should have been provided to
the court", he said. "The court is not afraid".
Asked to comment, Momade Satar claimed that not everything in the notes was a true account of
his talk with Frangoulis. In particular, he insisted that he had not taken part in the meetings at
Candida Cossa's house. Instead, he had heard about them from Anibalzinho.
"I just talked with Frangoulis about what I had heard in the prison", said Satar.
Anibalzinho was angered when Satar told him of the meeting with Frangoulis. "You'll get a nasty
surprise", he told him.
The "surprise", Satar said, was that a few days later, "Frangoulis was barred from entering this
prison". If this detail is true, it is another indication of the enormous influence Anibalzinho wielded
inside the prison and among the police.
Anibalzinho also told Satar that "he had no intention of going on trial, he only wanted to get out of
the prison. He said that "they" (he mentioned no names) had promised to get him out, and if he
appeared in court, there would be "a greater scandal".
Sure enough, on 1 September Anibalzinho disappeared from the top security prison, when all three
padlocks on his cell door were unlocked for him.
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"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
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Mitayo Potosi
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