Good afternoon. In September 2020, four members of the Armed Defence Forces of Mozambique (FADM) recorded a video of themselves beating and killing a naked woman just outside the town of Awasse, in Cabo Delgado province’s Mocímboa da Praia district. They were seen beating the woman and then shooting her a total of 36 times with automatic rifles and a machine gun. The soldiers, who were heard claiming on the video that the woman was an insurgent, all wore FADM uniforms. The NGO Amnesty International geo-located the video to a precise location outside Awasse on the R698 highway. Yet despite this compelling evidence, the Mozambican government did not investigate the matter and did not admit that its soldiers had murdered a civilian. This is what it does every time the security forces are accused of killing or mistreating people in Cabo Delgado, which over the years has happened a lot. Even when the evidence is overwhelming, the government refuses to admit that its forces commit human rights atrocities.
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And so it is with the infamous “container massacre” when, according to reliable sources, Mozambican armed forces killed around 200 men who were imprisoned in containers just outside the entrance to the workers’ camp for the liquefied natural gas project led by TotalEnergies on Cabo Delgado’s Afungi peninsula. The killings took place over three months in 2021, after TotalEnergies had evacuated the site following an insurgent attack on the nearby town of Palma.
