Maputo, 10 May (AIM) – Mozambican Prime Minister Adriano Maleiane on Wednesday told the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, that the government is setting up a specalised police unit to deal with kidnappings.
The government promised such a unit a year ago, and Maleiane’s speech suggested that it is on the way to becoming a reality.
The first phase in setting up the new unit was selecting the police agents who would be part of it, and that has now been completed.
The second phase was specialist training of the unit’s members, with the support of foreign cooperation partners.
The third phase, said Maleiane, ran alongside the first two phases, and consisted of mobilising technical equipment “to endow the Unit with greater operational capacity, in order to meet the operational and investigative challenges posed by this type of crime”.
The Prime Minister added that the police had registered 28 cases of kidnapping from 2021 to the present. 15 of these cases “have been completely cleared up, which is a success rate of 56.6 per cent”.
Investigations of the remaining kidnap cases will continue, Maleiane pledged. Contacts have been made with the other countries of the region, particularly South Africa, in the context of the fight against organised crime, notably kidnapping, drug trafficking and trafficking in human beings.
Maleiane blamed the recent surge in inflation on the Russian war against Ukraine. The war “is affecting the prices of commodities, particularly grain, petroleum and their derivatives. This is influencing negatively the performance of the world economy, with a sharp increase in inflation”.
Other factors influencing inflation in Mozambique were the terrorist raids in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, and the effects of extreme climatic events.
Annual inflation in Mozambique reached 10.82 per cent in March, which compares with only 6.65 per cent in March 2022.
Summarising the damage done by the 2022/2023 rainy season, including Cylone Freddy, which hit the country twice in March and April, Maleiane said that 314 people had died, mainly due to flooding, lightning strikes, and the collapse of flimsy houses, killing the people living in them.
Humanitarian assistance was provided to 441,000 people affected by natural disasters, of whom 381,000 were living temporarily in accommodation centres set up by the government.
(AIM)
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