A team sent by Portugal, including members of the Judicial Police (PJ) and the Institute of Forensic Medicine, is already working with the Mozambican investigation service on the case of Portuguese citizen Pedro Ferraz dos Reis, an official source said on Monday. “I can confirm their arrival. We are working (…).
Today, as soon as they arrived, work began,” Hilário Lole, spokesperson for Mozambique’s National Criminal Investigation Service (SERNIC), told Lusa. A team composed of members of the Judicial Police (Portugal’s main criminal investigation agency) and the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, sent by the Portuguese Government, arrived in Mozambique today to accompany the investigations into the death of Portuguese citizen Pedro Ferraz Reis, a member of the executive board of Mozambican bank BCI. According to Lole, “everything is going well” in the cooperation between the Portuguese and Mozambican authorities, and there may be “perhaps, in the end, some communication”.
The team “will accompany the investigations into the death of businessman Pedro Ferraz Reis, in close cooperation with the judicial and police authorities,” according to a joint statement released on Saturday by the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. The death of Pedro Ferraz shocked the Portuguese and Mozambican communities, and the willingness to cooperate with Portugal in the investigation is seen locally as positive and unusual. Mozambique’s SERNIC told Lusa on Thursday that it has not yet closed the investigation into the Portuguese man’s death and that proceedings are ongoing.
Read Full Article on Club of Mozambique
[paywall]
“According to the forensic report, as well as the evidence found at the scene, the layout of the evidence, there is no doubt that it was suicide. However, it is necessary to ascertain why it may have been suicide, as [the] suicide may have been provoked. So, there are these elements that still need to be ascertained,” said Hilário Lole.
SERNIC had announced on Tuesday that the 56-year-old Portuguese citizen committed suicide in a hotel in Maputo, contradicting the police’s initial version of the incident as a homicide. According to the Mozambican investigative police, the Portuguese citizen and member of the executive board of BCI bank, a subsidiary in Mozambique of the Portuguese state-owned group Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) bank and also the Portuguese BPI bank, took his own life in the bathroom of a luxury hotel in the centre of Maputo using sharp instruments, namely knives, and ingesting rat poison. At the press conference, CCTV footage was shown of the Portuguese citizen buying knives and rat poison.
Previously, the spokesperson for the Police of the Republic of Mozambique (PRM) in the city of Maputo, Marta Pereira, stated that the Portuguese citizen’s death was the result of homicide and that investigations were ongoing, based on CCTV footage from the hotel, adding that the crime took place on Monday at 11:46 p.m. and that it was “a voluntary homicide”.
[/paywall]
