Nine Pakistani citizens travelling aboard a vessel from Mombasa, Kenya were detained and a year later tried and convicted of drug trafficking.[1] In December, an agent of the Rapid Intervention Force and senior local law-and-order figures were tried and given heavy prison sentences over the episode.[1] They included the former director of the Criminal Investigation Police and the former commander and logistics chief of the Rapid Intervention Force.[1]
The case began in July 2000 when a shipwreck washed drugs concealed in coffee tins onto the coast of Inhambane in southern Mozambique, where authorities collected them.[1] Mozambique was finally destroying 12 tonnes of hashish seized accidentally off the coast some years earlier.[1] About a month before the January 2007 report, the remaining hashish had been moved to Maputo for immediate destruction.[1] The operation was supervised and witnessed by Inhambane provincial prosecutor Américo Mazenga, who told Radio Mozambique that 12.800 tonnes of hashish had been weighed.[1] Mazenga said incinerating the drugs in Maputo reflected past experience and ended the case of the drugs recovered from the waters off Bazaruto in Vilankulo.[1]
The seized hashish should have been destroyed earlier but stayed in storage, allowing about three tonnes to disappear.[1] Senior officials were implicated in the disappearance of just over two tonnes of the seized drugs.[1] The disappearance of 2 tonnes led to the conviction of several police agents.[1]
