In a mop-up operation, Tanzania police arrested 104 suspected terror militants reportedly planning to set-up operational radical camps in the neighbouring Mozambique.
The past one year a number of terror related incidents have been reported in Mozambique where scores of people have been killed. The Islamists attacks have been linked to Al-Shabaab elements from Tanzania now spreading insurgency into Mozambique.
Forty attacks have been recorded since October 2017 especially in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, neighbouring Tanzania border where companies have been set up citing the biggest natural gas deposits.
More than 100 people have been killed in gun, grenade and knife raids (decapitations) in the growing jihadist insurgency with the militants seeking to impose Sharia law in the Muslim-majority province.
The suspects involved in the trial include Mozambicans, Tanzanians, Congolese, Somalis and Burundians, of whom 42 are women.
As the insurgency has spread through the province, several hundred Muslims have been arrested and several mosques forced to close. Research has also shown that members of the group were staunch followers of Kenyan radical Islamic scholar, Abud Rogo, who was killed in 2012. After his death, his followers escaped to Kibiti, southern Tanzania close to the border of Mozambique.
Earlier this month, Mozambique put 189 people, including foreigners, on trial on claims of involvement in Islamist attacks in Cabo Delgado.
Its is possible that the militants wish to set the camps Cabo Delgado in order to disrupt or gain from natural gas proceeds. The province is close to one of the world’s biggest untapped offshore natural gas fields projected for billions of dollars.
Mozambique has no history of Islamist insurgency and government had been reluctant to credit the attacks to radical Islamist militants.
Following spate of attacks, President Filipe Nyusi in June 2018, vowed to firmly and relentlessly deal with those responsible for the attacks.
About 30 per cent of Mozambique’s 30 million population are Roman Catholics, while 18 per cent are Muslim.
