Notorious murderer found dead in his cell

Maputo, 28 Mar (AIM) – Mozambique’s most notorious murderer, Momade Assife Abdul Satar (better known as Nini Satar) was found dead in his cell in the Maputo top security prison before dawn on Friday morning.

The prison authorities have not yet announced the cause of Satar’s death, but one radio report said he had suffered convulsions.

Satar was serving a 24 year prison sentence for his part in the murder of the country’s foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, on 22 November 2000.

The Maputo city law court found that Satar, his brother Ayob Abul Satar, and former bank manager Vicente Ramaya, ordered the murder. They recruited a three-man death squad, led by Anibal dos Santos Junior (“Anibalzinho”) who ambushed Cardoso on his way home from the newsroom of “Metical”, the independent newsheet he owned and edited.

The murderers targeted Cardoso because he had tenaciously followed the huge bank fraud through which the equivalent of 14 million US dollars was syphoned out of the country’s largest bank, the BCM, on the eve of its privatisation in 1996.

The Satars opened fraudulent accounts in Ramaya’s branch of the BCM. Worthless cheques were rapidly deposited in those accounts, and very real mony flowed out of them into the pockets of the Satars and their accomplices.

When the fraud was uncovered, serious corruption in the Attorney-General’s Office meant that the case never came to court, and key members of the Abdul Satar family were allowed to flee the country and seek refuge in Dubai.

Cardoso pursued the case tenaciously, demanding that those who defrauded the BCM be brought to justice, and investigating the Satars’ other business activities. He discovered that the Satars were running a loansharking operation, offering loans to other members of the Asian community at usurious interest rates and demanding their property when they were unable to pay.

The Satars and Ramaya decided that Cardoso was an obstacle to their plans and he had to be shut up. As the Cardoso family lawyer, Lucinda Cruz, declared, at the end of the trial, “the only way to silence Carlos Cardoso was to kill him”.

In 2004, Satar and several accomplices were found guilty of defrauding the BCM. He was sentenced to a further 14 years jail time – but he has never served a day of this sentence.

He was granted parole, but police and prosecutors were angered by Satar’s early release. They were convinced that, far from being a model inmate, Satar had been active, from his prison cell, in planning other crimes, including the kidnappings of business people, mostly of Asian origin. Satar never had any problem in acquiring cell phones, even though such devices are not allowed inside prisons.

Satar was charged in a 2013 kidnap case – but the presiding judge scrubbed his name from the list of suspects. That same Maputo judge, Aderito Malhope, later in 2014, authorised Satar’s request to travel abroad, supposedly for medical treatment in India, though it was not stated what condition he suffered from which required treatment outside of Mozambique.

The Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) continued to investigate Satar’s connections with the kidnappings and his name was on the charge sheet in two cases opened in early 2017. During these investigations, said a PGR statement of April 2017, “it was found that the accused, Momad Assife Abdul Satar, formed a criminal organisation with the purpose of kidnapping Mozambican citizens, so that later large amounts of money in ransom could be demanded”.

In light of these findings, the PGR issued an international arrest warrant, and the Maputo City Court revoked Satar’s parole status.

From that moment he was a fugitive, and the Mozambican authorities enlisted the help of Interpol to track him down. He was eventually found living in Thailand, where he was arrested on 25 July 2017, and deported.

In Thailand he had used a false Mozambican passport in the name of his nephew, Sahime Mohammed Aslam. This was enough for prosecutors to charge him with corruption, forgery and using a false name.

In the new charge sheet, Satar is also accused of kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, theft, use of forbidden weapons, and membership of a criminal association. But, given Satar’s unexpected demise, it seems unlikely that the truth about his connections with kidnap gangs will come to light.

Nini Satar’s co-conspirators, who were also granted parole, have already met sticky ends. Vicente Ramaya was shot dead on 21 February 2014 in the Maputo neighbourhood of Polana Cimento. Ayob Abdul Satar was shot dead on 2 July 2014 in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Neither of these two murders has ever been solved.
(AIM)
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