The Mozambican police on Wednesday arrested two young men in the western city of Tete accused of attempting to kidnap a 14 year old boy.
According to the police, cited in Thursday’s issue of the independent daily 'O Pais', the grisly purpose of the kidnapping was to cut off the boy’s genitals, which would then have been sold (presumably for purposes of black magic).
The boy, Juma Domingos, works as a porter in the market in the Tete neighbourhood of Matundo. During his work, he was approached by the two alleged kidnappers, Fernando Adelino and Timoteo Fernando, who asked him to carry goods they had purchased (50 kilos of rice and five kilos of vegetable oil) to a waiting car they had hired.
They were to pay Juma 15 meticais (about 38 US cents) for this service. But once they reached the care, they said they did not have any small change. They demanded that the boy accompany them to their house.
“They forced me to get into the car, but I didn’t want to”. Juma told reporters. “They pushed me and I began to cry and shout for help. Suddenly the driver began to shoot, and other people appeared also shooting”.
The “others” were apparently police officers, who took Juma to the nearest police station, where he was able to phone his parents.
The spokesperson for the Tete Provincial Police Command, Luis Nudia, said the police had already been on the trail of Adelino and Fernando.
“They wanted to kill the boy to extract his genitals”, said Nudia."But the police were on their tracks. When they realized the police were nearby, they tried to escape. The police fired into the air and the two youths had to surrender".
The police had been following the two because they knew they intended to traffic in human body parts. They had made phone calls seeking buyers for boys’ genitals. One of the people phoned was horrified and contacted the police.
A trap was set, and when the two men hired a car on Wednesday, they were unaware that the driver of the car was a plain clothes policeman.
Nudia claimed that, under questioning, the two confessed that they had indeed been in contact with someone who was willing to pay 700,000 meticais for a set of male genitalia.