AG seeks to have kidnap victims' assets frozen

Mozambique’s Attorney-General, Americo Letela, has suggested that the authorities should freeze the assets of kidnap victims and their families to prevent them from paying ransoms to kidnap gangs. According to the Club of Mozambique, while giving his annual report to Parliament on the state of the justice system, Letela noted that business people and their families were feeling insecure, and this crime required the adoption of ‘exceptional measures’. Despite some successes last year, the prevalence of kidnapping ‘shows that additional efforts should be undertaken by the state’. Letela felt the freeze would discourage kidnappings and claimed that other countries had adopted such measures. Letela announced that last year the authorities opened 32 criminal proceedings against people involved in kidnappings – a reduction of almost 47% when compared with the 60 cases recorded in 2023. ‘Despite these efforts, the difficulty of identifying and neutralising the masterminds of these crimes persists. On the one hand, due to the highly sophisticated and complex way in which the networks operate, and on the other, due to the fact that some of them operate from outside the country,’ he said. Letela also pointed to the infiltration of organised crime into the bodies charged with the administration of justice, which ‘undermines the efforts made in the fight against organised crime and the arrests of the offenders’. He admitted that in some cases police officers are involved in planning and carrying out kidnappings, while some magistrates ‘motivated by schemes of corruption guarantee the criminals impunity’.

Full report on the Club of Mozambique site