Mozambique army claim to have killed 41 insurgents in fighting after Palma attack

MAPUTO, Mozambique 

Mozambican government forces shot 41 “insurgents” between 28 and 30 March, following clashes that followed the rebel attack on the town of Palma on 24 March, a military spokesman told Lusa.

Chongo Vidigal, a spokesman for the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique (FADM) in the Northern Operational Theatre, said that 37 fighters from the armed group that attacked Palma were counted at various points in the town, and four were found four days ago in a mass grave in search and pursuit actions against the insurgents.

“A badly buried hand of a corpse drew our attention to the existence of a mass grave where the terrorists buried their comrades because they failed to take them with them during their escape, as they normally do, to leave no clues of casualties,” Vidigal said.

In the same mass grave, the Mozambican Defence and Security Forces (FDS) discovered buried weapons in the possession of the “dead terrorists,” he added.

The FADM spokesman in the Northern Operational Theatre advanced that 150 youths were kidnapped by the “terrorists” during their raid on Palma, but three managed to escape from their kidnappers.

“We fear that so many others may have been executed for having resisted joining the terrorists, in light of the testimonies that have reached us from the three young men who managed to escape,” Chongo Vidigal stated.

Vidigal reiterated the assurances he has already given several times to the media that government forces fully recover Palma and that operations are underway to pursue the armed groups that have been terrorising Cabo Delgado province for over three years.

“The town of Palma is under the effective control of our forces, and life is tending to return to normality, although this is happening timidly,” the spokesman stressed.

The timid return of the population is also because the administrative structures of Palma have not yet returned and assumed their functions.

“We still don’t have the administrator and the district directors here, and so the population is timidly returning, but activities such as commerce have resumed,” he added.

The 24 March attack on Palma represented the escalation of violence led by armed groups in Cabo Delgado province because it was the first time that the town was hit, around six kilometres from the complex being built for the production of natural gas by oil multinationals.

The attacks caused dozens of deaths and forced thousands of Palma residents to flee, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis that has affected around 700,000 people in the province, according to the United Nations, since the beginning of the conflict in 2017, and which has led to the death of over 2,500 people, according to Lusa.