Good afternoon. It would be unwise to expect the government to provide the truth about what happened in prisons in Maputo province in December last year, when over 1,500 prisoners escaped (see below). No detailed explanation of how the escapes took place has been provided by the authorities yet. Then justice minister Helena Kida said that they were caused by riots, but Bernardino Rafael, the police chief at the time, suggested that the prisoners had been freed from outside.
The full Daily Briefing continues below for Pro subscribers. Subscribers to the Zitamar News tier can read the top half, including the full leader article, here.
If justice minister Mateus Saize is to be believed, the prisoners were released by people protesting in the wake of the disputed election results; something else to blame on them. But this is contradicted by accounts coming from within the prisons system that prison guards, possibly disgruntled with the government, opened the gates from inside and helped the prisoners to escape. Certainly demonstrators in the past few months have been freeing prisoners from police stations, but it is doubtful that they had the means to break into prisons without help.
