It was the afternoon of 7 January 2025, and Arlindo Chissale had just boarded a minibus in Pemba heading for Nacala. The 46-year-old editor of Pinnacle News, a community journalism platform covering Cabo Delgado’s conflict with forensic precision, read by more than 70,000 followers, was making a routine trip. He would never arrive. In the village of Silva Macua, five men stopped the vehicle. Two were dressed in police uniform. They pulled Chissale from his seat, beat him, forced him into a white, unlicensed car and drove away. His loved ones have not heard from him since.
Chissale had been warned that morning by a friend. Several sources confirmed as much to this consortium. He went anyway. He had already been detained once before under an anti-terrorism charge, in 2022. He understood the risks.
His phone went dark. Roughly a month later, according to CPJ, it briefly reactivated, the kind of digital ghost that investigators can trace if they choose to. Mozambican authorities have not publicly acknowledged trying. His peers and loved ones presume him dead. No one has been charged.
Pull the thread of that disappearance and a country comes with it: court files, testimony from witnesses who buried their own. Chissale was not the first. He was not the last. And everywhere the thread leads, it leads back to the same place, the same uniforms, the same silence from prosecutors, the same law deployed as a weapon against those who reported and those who marched.
Since Mozambique's disputed October 2024 election, journalists, opposition organisers, and protesters have been killed, disappeared, and prosecuted in numbers that dwarf the period's other violence. M28 Investigates, alongside nine other media outlets coordinated by Forbidden Stories, is publishing Mozambique Exposed, an investigation into the architecture of that violence. Reporting teams spent five months reviewing court files, witness accounts, and civil-society monitor datasets. What emerges is not a series of unconnected tragedies but a recurring architecture: paramilitary and intelligence agencies moving against the state's critics, often under the cover of a 2018 anti-terrorism statute. As of June 2026, almost no officer has been publicly charged.
The Record Before 2024
The danger did not begin with the October vote. The ledger stretches back years. On 7 April 2020, Ibraimo Abú Mbaruco, a presenter for Rádio Comunitária de Palma in the gas-producing north, managed to send a single text to a colleague: he was "surrounded by soldiers." No one has heard from him since. Fernando Gonçalves, who was a senior official at MISA Mozambique at the time, told CPJ that an anonymous police officer claimed soldiers had taken Mbaruco to Mueda for interrogation.
The Political Ledger
Running alongside the journalists’ ledger is a political one, and it is just as bloody. On 19 October 2024, the day before Mondlane’s first planned protest, Elvino Dias, his electoral lawyer, and Paulo Guambe, the PODEMOS spokesperson, were gunned down in Maputo. CDD director Adriano Nuvunga told local media the attackers had emptied between ten and fifteen bullets from AK-47-type rifles. Witnesses said police kept an ambulance from reaching Guambe as he lay dying.
The killings did not stop with the polls. PODEMOS representative Sande António was shot dead in his home on the night of President Daniel Chapo’s inauguration. Party representative Vale Magalhães told Deutsche Welle: “the police had surrounded the house, so it was the police who shot him.” By early 2025 the deaths had become almost routine: Daniel Guambe and Rafito Sitoe, both PODEMOS members, shot dead in Massinga on 8 March, days after helping arrange a Mondlane visit; the bodies of Ivo Armando Nhantumbo and João de Deus Nhachengo turning up in Inhambane a week later.
In formal complaints to the Attorney General's Office reviewed by this consortium, Mondlane's ANAMOLA party documented six killings by what the complaints call "death squads," alongside cases of opposition supporters abducted and beaten by special police units.
Albino Sibia, a 30-year-old blogger known as "Mano Shottas," was shot dead while livestreaming a protest in the border town of Ressano Garcia on 12 December 2024. His killing, filmed on his own phone, watched live by thousands, was the most documented of the post-electoral deaths. Witness José Chilenge, standing two metres away, told CPJ that a UIR officer fired once, then fired again after Sibia had fallen.
"They've shot me… I'm dying,"
Sibia said from the ground. He died within four hours. Two days later, UIR officers returned to his funeral and opened fire, killing two more people and wounding journalist Pedro Júnior, who was shot in the hand while covering the burial for the local channel SPMTV. No officer has been charged for any of it.
The Surveillance State
The intelligence infrastructure enabling these killings is more sophisticated than often acknowledged. A security analyst who monitors the conflict from outside Mozambique described to this consortium a layered system: phone interception through compliant telecoms, including the state-owned operator and a second carrier with reported links to a Vietnamese military company and to FRELIMO through a local holding structure, alongside the deployment of informants inside newsrooms and civil society.
A security analyst who monitors the conflict from outside Mozambique described SERNIC - the National Criminal Investigation Service - to this consortium as politically well-connected operatives backed by the ruling regime, deployed across the country to hunt down government critics. A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to this consortium the existence of what he called "black sites" run by a mixture of the Interior Ministry and Mozambican intelligence services.
The Terrorism Law as Instrument
Written to fight insurgents in the north, Law 1/2018 is now turned on opposition figures and protesters across the country. The law's definitions are deliberately broad: acts of protest can be constructed as "urban terrorism," reporting on the Cabo Delgado conflict can be cast as assistance to insurgents.
"Everyone who protests is called a terrorist and indicted using this terrorist law,"
Nhamirre told this consortium.
"The terrorist law comes with more heavy penalties. It can be manipulated. All political acts like protests can be considered terrorism."
Chissale himself was held under this law in 2022. On 22 July 2025, it was deployed against Mondlane: five counts, more than twenty years, and to the Institute for Security Studies it read less like a prosecution than a manoeuvre, lawfare designed to keep him off the 2029 ballot.
The provincial governor of Cabo Delgado made the governing logic explicit in a publicly available statement: how, he asked, could journalists report on what was happening in the war zone without being in contact with terrorists? The remark was not retracted. It has framed the operational posture of security forces in the province ever since.
The New Media Law: Institutionalising the Architecture
In September 2025, the Mozambican government adopted a revision of its media legislation that converts ad hoc pressure on journalists into a formal legal structure. The new law creates the Autoridade Reguladora da Comunicação Social (ARCoS), which will issue mandatory press cards, without which journalism becomes a licensed activity the state can revoke. It makes both the author of online content and the platform that hosts it jointly liable for criminal prosecution. Most strikingly, it explicitly prohibits proof of truth as a defence when the subject of alleged insult is the President of the Republic.
The practical effect is to convert every piece of critical reporting about President Chapo into potential criminal exposure with no factual defence available. Journalists interviewed by this consortium said the law has already accelerated self-censorship that was well advanced before it passed. "The number of newspapers that publish against the regime has reduced," Nhamirre said. "If you look at all the newsrooms in Maputo, you find nothing about the war in Cabo Delgado, nothing about the forced disappearances of journalists and activists. Nothing."
The Paper Trail
The testimony from witnesses and civil-society monitors does not stand alone. Plataforma DECIDE counted roughly 315 killed and 633 wounded by gunfire in protests between 21 October 2024 and mid-January 2025, alongside more than 4,200 arrests; other monitors have pushed the death toll toward 400. The European Union’s election observation mission recorded without euphemism that police
“used heavy-handed tactics to disperse the protests using live ammunition and tear gas on unarmed civilians, journalists, and civil society.”
The Office of the Attorney General announced an investigation into security-force violations against civilians on 4 March 2025. It has produced no public output. No officer has been publicly charged over Sibia’s killing, the funeral shooting, the abductions of Chissale or Mbaruco, or the killings of Dias and Guambe.
The Government’s Answer
President Chapo has been explicit in his own public statements. On 24 February 2025, speaking in Pemba, he compared protesters to terrorists and declared:
"Just as we fight terrorism and young people shed their blood for Mozambique's territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence, even if we must shed blood to defend this homeland against demonstrations, we will."
The Police General Command says only that its investigations remain ongoing.
M28 Investigates and Forbidden Stories put detailed questions to the Mozambican presidency, to the Mozambican government, to the Ministry of the Interior, covering UIR, SERNIC, and DIO; to the Ministry of National Defence, covering FADM; and to the Ministry of Justice and the Procurador Geral de Moçambique over any ongoing investigations into the deaths of João Chamusse, Albino Sibia, Arlindo Chissale, Elvino Dias, and Paulo Guambe. At the time of writing, not one Mozambican government body had offered a reply.
The Pattern
The deaths, the disappearances, the prosecutions, they span different actors, different towns, different years. But step back and a shape comes into focus. Journalists who reported on post-electoral protests or on security operations in Cabo Delgado have ended up, disappeared, or threatened. Opposition organisers have fallen in greater numbers still. A 2018 anti-terrorism law written to fight insurgents has been turned on protesters in the street and on the most prominent opposition figure in the country alike. A new media law has institutionalised the suppression.
Whether all of this adds up to a directed policy, orders written somewhere, transmitted down a chain of command to a trigger in a cemetery, is the question the evidence leaves open. What the record does establish, past argument, is narrower and no less damning: the killings happened, the hands most often documented on the weapons were those of state security forces, and a law written to fight insurgents is now turned on those who march and those who report.
Arlindo Chissale boarded a bus in Pemba. He sent no final text. The minibus stopped. The men were waiting.
