Three unidentified assailants kidnapped a young woman on Wednesday morning in the Maputo elite neighbourhood of Sommerschield, reported the local media.
The assailants snatched Zakia Dassat, the daughter of an Asian businessman, Ahmad Rafik, with interests in the commercial sector, when she was about to get into her vehicle.
The criminals fired shots in the air to discourage neighbours and security guards who attempted to help the victim, who shouted for help as she was being dragged into a waiting vehicle, which then got away.
Comment
Since the first kidnapping for ransom in 2008, Mozambique has been home to a wave of kidnappings mainly targeting citizens of Asian descent, mostly in the capital Maputo.
The latest kidnapping is the first in the era of Interior Minister Pascoal Ronda, who on 28 August replaced then minister Arsénia Massingue – the kidnapping took place while he was speaking in the Assembly of the Republic, the country’s parliament. Ronda is the third interior minister in President Filipe Nyusi’s second five-year term of office.
Ronda was police general-commander between 1995 to 2001, and for internal interest groups, his being a retired policeman is synonymous with the capacity to run the ministry.
However, Ronda not unlike his two predecessors is no longer an operative as he is now a minister. Which is why it is strange that Bernardino Rafael, an important piece in the fight against crime, is still being kept as police general-commander even though the kidnapping phenomenon does not seem to abate.
Furthermore, it is also strange that criminal investigation is currently undertaken by the police and not by the National Criminal Investigation Service (SERNIC) as mandated by law. It is even more strange that Rafael announced in 2021 the establishment of an anti-kidnapping unit, something that was also promised by then minister Massingue in May 2023 – it is strange that for a country where the wave of kidnappings is in the region of hundreds, it is taking so long to establish an anti-kidnapping unit.
What is clear is that kidnapping has become such a profitable business. The Confederation of Businesses Associations (CTA) says that so far kidnappers’ ill-gotten gains total $34 million, driving away investors to the detriment of the country’s economy.
Perhaps one of the reasons that kidnappings continue is that some of the kidnappers are members of the country’s law enforcement institutions, who drive the web of criminality.
So far, very few kidnapping cases have come to court. In most cases, the families of kidnapping victims pay the ransom to see their loved ones back in their midst. Even then, apparently, they are made to pay a “daily freedom tax” to guarantee that they are not re-kidnapped.
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