Uncertainty over the death of Portuguese banker Pedro Ferraz Correia dos Reis, in Maputo, Mozambique, last week has led the government to send a team (including elements of PJ judicial police and the coroner’s office) to ‘accompany’ investigations underway.
The uncertainty centres on Mozambican authorities’ initial statements that this appeared to be a case of murder, which they then changed to suicide.
The banker’s body was found with stab wounds to his hands, neck, one thigh, back and heart, says SIC
A source for SERNIC (Mozambique’s criminal investigation service) also made an unusual statement when reassessing the initial theory of murder: “According to the forensic report, as well as the evidence found at the scene and the layout of that evidence, there is no doubt that it was suicide,” said Hilário Lole. “However, it is necessary to investigate why it may have been suicide, but (the) suicide may have been provoked. So, there are these elements that still need to be investigated.”
According to SIC today, it is not usual for Portugal to send a team to accompany police investigations involving nationals in Mozambique – but there has been no opposition to the decision. Correio dos Reis’ death has shocked all those who knew him – particularly those with whom he worked at BCI bank in Maputo (a subsidiary of state bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos), and who saw no indications that their colleague meant to end his life.
The reason for theories ‘changing’ appear to have come from CCTV images which apparently showed the 56-year-old buying knives and rat poison before he was found dead in one of the bathrooms of the Polana Serena luxury hotel, late on Monday night.
Before the CCTV images came to light, a spokesperson for the Mozambique Republican Police announced Correio dos Reis was ‘murdered’ in what she described as a ‘voluntary homicide’ (again using terminology that caused some mystification).
Since then an online petition has gathered thousands of signatures, pointing to “incongruencies in the explanations”. The text – addressed to the President of the Assembly of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Affairs – stresses that the suicide explanation is “inappropriate and unimaginable”, refuting the notion that Correia dos Reis “left his workplace to go home to fetch a knife from his kitchen, then went to a shop to buy two more knives, then went to another shop to buy rat poison, and then committed suicide in a hotel”.
But this is exactly what SERNIC is trying to suggest. Says SIC, the criminal investigation service has said that ‘on Monday, Pedro Correia left his workplace at 2 pm (midday in Portugal) and headed home, where he took a knife. He went to a shop on the Maputo waterfront to buy, among other items, two more knives, which were later found inside his car. He then went to another shop, where he bought rat poison, and “traces of this substance were found in his body” during the forensic examination’.
Source: SIC Notícias
