MAPUTO, Mozambique — Gunmen in two vehicles chased down the lawyer for Mozambique’s leading opposition politician and a senior opposition official and fatally shot them in their SUV late at night on a main avenue in the capital, their party said Saturday, in a brutal burst of violence that rocked a country where tensions were already high amid a disputed election.
The killings came as the opposition party the two men were associated with prepared to challenge the results of this month’s presidential election that drew more allegations of vote rigging and clamping down on dissent against the long-ruling governing party, which has been in power for nearly 50 years.
Elvino Dias, a lawyer and advisor to opposition presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane, was killed late Friday night by gunmen who riddled his car with bullets in the port capital of Maputo, the PODEMOS opposition party said.
Paulo Guambe, a senior member and the spokesperson for PODEMOS, was also in the car with Dias and died in the shooting, the party said in a statement.
The killings are “further clear evidence of the lack of justice that we are all subjected to,” PODEMOS said.
PODEMOS is a relatively new opposition party that challenged the 49-year rule of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or Frelimo, party in the Oct. 9 election.
Although Mondlane ran for president as an independent, he was supported by PODEMOS. Mondlane, PODEMOS and other opposition parties have accused Frelimo of electoral fraud and rigging the election.
Frelimo candidate Daniel Chapo holds a clear lead in the presidential race, according to preliminary results. Mondlane was second behind Chapo in the count.
The final election results are due to be announced next week and Chapo is expected to be announced as the winner to succeed President Filipe Nyusi, who has served a maximum of two terms, taking the leftist Frelimo’s grip on power past a half-century.
Dias was seen as a key figure in the legal preparations to challenge the results of the election in the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s supreme electoral court. Mondlane and PODEMOS had also called for a nationwide strike and protests on Monday against the election results.
Adriano Nuvunga, the director of Mozambican human rights NGO, the Centre for Democracy and Development, wrote on social media that the killing of Dias was a “political assassination” amid rising tensions.
Authorities did not immediately comment on the killings, widely viewed in Mozambique as politically motivated.
Frelimo, which has been in power in the southern African country since independence from Portugal in 1975, has often been accused of rigging elections, which it has consistently denied.
Rights groups accused Mozambican authorities of clamping down on dissent in the run-up to the election and have also accused the security forces of using deadly force to break up peaceful protests. Police broke up a post-election march by Mondlane supporters in the central city of Nampula earlier this week. There has been a large police presence on the streets of Maputo for days.
While Frelimo has regularly faced accusations of manipulating elections, harassing the opposition and the arbitrary arrests of journalists, the assassination of high-profile political leaders would be new “and a major escalation of violence,” Marcelo Mosse, editor of the independent online newspaper Carta de Moçambique, wrote in a Saturday morning column.
The shooting happened just before midnight on Joaquim Chissano Avenue near the Russian Embassy, according to a local resident, who said he heard the gunshots. The resident, who asked not to be identified, said he was close enough to smell the gunpowder in the air after the shooting. He said he heard a steady sequence of around five shots followed a few seconds later by another round of five shots.
Videos published on social media - and shared widely in Mozambique - showed a dark gray BMW SUV in the middle of the road with numerous bullet holes in the bodywork. People were gathered around the car soon after the shooting, and some of the videos showed what appeared to be the bodies of two men, one with blood on his chest, in the front seats. The other body was slumped over.
The Mozambican Bar Association condemned the “barbaric murder” of Dias, who had been a member. The organization said the killing was “an attack on the legal profession, its independence, the rule of law and democracy,” and called for a protest march to be held in all provinces.
Frelimo established a one-party state following independence and then fought a bloody, 15-year civil war against the rebel group Renamo. They signed a peace deal in 1992 and Renamo became the main opposition party following the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, but the peace between them has been fragile.
Mondlane was previously a member of the Renamo party before leaving to run for president as an independent and becoming the leading opposition candidate.
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