MAPUITO – The mastermind behind the assassination of a journalist and linked to the spate of kidnappings plaguing the country, had become the target of a hit himself. On Friday AIM reported that two assailants murdered Vicente Ramaya, one of the businessmen who ordered the assassination of Mozambique´s finest investigative journalist’s, Mr Carlos Cardoso in November 2000.
Ramaya, who had been on parole since January 2013, after serving half of his sentence for the Cardoso murder, was shot in his car in the Maputo neighbourhood of Polana. He was accompanied by his brother-in-law, Mr Nazir Sale.
According to a report on Mozambican Independent Television (TIM), Sale rushed Ramaya to Maputo Central Hospital, but he was dead on arrival. All that was known of the murderers was that they were of Asian appearance.
Ramaya had been the brains behind the largest case of banking fraud in the country’s history. Fraudulent accounts were opened at his branch of the Mozambican Commercial Bank (BCM) in the city’s suburb of Sommerschield, in the names of members and friends of the Abdul Satar family, through which the equivalent of US$14 million was siphoned out of the bank on the eve of its privatisation.
Cardoso, director of AIM in the 1980s, who later founded the independent news-sheets Mediafax and Metical, pursued the case tenaciously, demanding that those who had defrauded BCM be brought to justice. At its verdict, in January 2003, the Maputo City Court decided that the BCM investigation was the motive for the assassination, and that Ramaya and two of his associates, Momad Assife Abdul Satar (“Nini”) and Ayob Abdul Satar, had given the order to kill the journalist.
Ramaya was sentenced to a prison term of 23 years and six months. Lowvelder had previously reported that its source had also revealed that the kidnappings were being orchestrated inside the prison (known as the BO) and from the cells of the Maputo city police command.
Attorney Gen Mr Augusto Paulino, had implicated Ramaya to be behind the spate of abductions. Satar still remained behind bars, and at one stage last year, prosecutors believed they had the evidence to charge him with ordering some of the initial kidnappings that occurred in late 2011 and early 2012.
But before the case came to trial last September, a Maputo judge, Mr Aderito Malhope, removed Satar’s name from the list of accused.
Mr Nazir Loonat, spokesman for the Islamic community in Maputo, told Lowvelder that families were losing hope. They had employed investigators from all over the world who had handed all the evidence to officials and nothing had been done.
Another source confirmed that through some families’ private investigations, the ransom money had been traced where it was transferred to South African, Hong Kong and Chinese bank accounts.
