“Mozambique Exposed” is an investigation being carried out by a consortium of 30 journalists from ten different media outlets based in France, Germany, the United States, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Rwanda and Mozambique and coordinated by Forbidden Stories. FRANCE 24 and RFI are partners in this project. In a video posted in private WhatsApp groups on January 4, 2025, Arlindo Chissale’s voice and face are grave as he speaks to the camera. Behind him are the small backstreets of Pemba, the capital of the Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado. “We are sad, but motivated, right? Sad about the death of one of our great leaders, who could have been elected as the administrator of the district of Montepuez,” he says.
In this video, filmed in Pemba and shared in a private WhatsApp group on January 4, 2025, Arlindo Chissale speaks out about the assassination of a leader of the Podemos political party in the city of Montepuez, in Cabo Delgado. © Arlindo Chissale
The night before, a member of the opposition political party Podemos was assassinated: shot in the middle of the street in Montepuez, a city in Cabo Delgado. The assassination occurred in the midst of a serious political crisis that engulfed the country following general elections held on October 9, 2024. In the presidential race, Venâncio Mondlane, the candidate backed by Podemos, lost to Daniel Chapo, the candidate from FRELIMO, the party that has been in power in the country since it obtained independence in 1975. Ten days later, two of Mondlane’s high-level supporters, lawyer Elvino Dias and artist Paulo Guambe, were in a car together when they were gunned down. Mondlane accused the Mozambican security forces of killing the pair. The government, for its part, said they were opening an investigation into the killings – an investigation that is still open. These murders marked the beginning of a wave of assassinations of high-level figures in Mondlane’s movement, especially those in Cabo Delgado. On January 3, 2025, a young man named Abudo Bacar Lawia was assassinated in Montepuez. The next day, Chissale, a Podemos member himself, posted a video denouncing the death. In it, he featured another high-level member of the party, who said: “The authorities are the most skilful [...] because they muddy the waters so that people won’t discover that the people carrying out these acts are members of SISE, SERNIC or UIR [Editor’s note: The Mozambican intelligence service, the criminal police and the riot police, respectively].”
