adminMAPUTO. — Militants have beheaded 10 villagers, women and children among them, in northern Mozambique, raising fears that Islamist extremists are gaining a new foothold in Africa.
Sunday’s attack on the village of Mojane, news of which only filtered out yesterday, represented the worst atrocity in a seven-month insurgency by a shadowy group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna.
The raid in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s most northerly province, will also renew scrutiny on Gemfields, a British mining company, whose alleged abuses are said to have created fertile ground for extremist recruitment.
Two children and four women were among those beheaded in the pre-dawn raid, government officials said.
Emerging silently from the forest, the men gave the villagers no opportunity to raise the alarm. Working methodically and with ruthless speed, they had disappeared long before the security forces arrived.
The extremists established two mosques where they began to preach hate, say locals, who know the group as “al Shabaab” – although there is no known link to the Somali Islamist militia of the same name.
The extremist messages won recruits in a marginalised area of high unemployment where most are Muslim.
Cabo Delgado, with large oil and gas reserves as well as the world’s biggest ruby and pink sapphire deposits, should be one of Mozambique’s richest provinces. Instead it is among the poorest.
Resentment from some in the province has centred around Gemfields, which mines the Montepuez Deposit, the location of 40 percent of the world’s rubies.
Last month, lawyers acting for locals issued High Court proceedings in London, accusing Gemfields of allowing its security guards to shoot, beat up and sexually abuse more than 100 people.
Campaigners say abuses, which are also blamed on the police, have been carried out on small-scale miners who have refused to leave Gemfield’s concessions. There have even been allegations of some miners being buried alive.
There is no proof, however, that resentment against Gemfields has prompted any locals to join Ansar al-Sunna.
Any anger is also just as likely to be directed against the army and the police, who have been accused of carrying out a number of extra-judicial killings against Muslim youths after October’s attacks. — The Telegraph/AFP/News Agencies.
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