MAPUTO – A new bill to combat the spree of kidnappings has been approved. On Tuesday AIM reported that the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, unanimously sanctioned a bill to increase the penalties for abductions.
In the kidnappers’ trials in October and November, the prosecutors and courts faced the problem that under the penal code, inherited from Portuguese colonial rule, there was no such crime as a.
Prosecutors thus had to charge the suspects with offences such as private imprisonment, criminal conspiracy and illegal possession of firearms.
AIM stated that the bill was passed and drafted by the parliamentary group of the ruling Frelimo Party. It says “anyone who by means of violence, threats, or any fraud, kidnaps another person, for the purpose of extortion, rape, ransom or reward” will be punished by a jail term from 12 to 16 years.
The penalty would rise from 16 to 20 years if serious harm was done to the victim, or if the abduction was accompanied “by torture or other cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment”. This longer prison term also applied in cases where the person kidnapped was a child, pregnant woman, disabled or seriously ill, and where the abductors were a public servant, or was pretending to be an agent of authority.
This would apply to policemen involved in kidnapping gangs.
If the snatching resulted in the death of the victim, the prison term would rise from 20 to 24 years. For “heinous crime” cases the penalty w ould then be 40 years’ imprisonment.
This bill had been rushed through due to the wave of kidnapping that had been occurring in Mozambican cities since 2011.
It would come into force before the new penal code currently under debate in the Assembly, which would not be adopted before March next year at the earliest.
Mr Nazir Loonat, spokesman for the Islamic community in Maputo, said families were losing hope. They had employed investigators from all over the world, handed over all the evidence to officials and nothing got done.
So far there have been 65 cases of kidnappings and not one has been solved before the payments have been made, and then there only have been a couple arrests of minor people involved.
