Mass poisonings - Africa and India

Alcohol can kill, especially it it’s laced with crocodile bile, or other lethal additives. In Mozambique, 69 people, including apparently a toddler, have died after drinking home-made beer, ironically, at a funeral.

Health officials believe contamination with crocodile bile made the drink lethal. The woman who brewed it and a number of her relatives are dead, and another 39 people are being treated in hospital.

Meanwhile in India, at least 29 people have died in Uttar Pradesh after drinking toxic liquor at a cricket match, and 100 more are in hospital. Some have lost their sight. Doctors say the drink may have been adulterated with cheap, but dangerous, methyl alcohol. The owner of the shop that sold it has been arrested.

Poisonings of this kind are depressingly common in India. Nearly 170 people died in 2011 in West Bengal, 107 in Gujarat in 2009, and 30 in Uttar Pradesh in the same year.

1986 air crash - accident or murder?

 

Police in South Africa have launched a fresh investigation into the plane crash in 1986 that killed the Mozambican president Samora Machel and 33 other people, including government ministers and officials.    The Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-134, taking them home from an international meeting in Lusaka, came down in a mountainous area of South Africa.

The following year, a South African judge, assisted by experts from the USA and the UK, said the cause was negligence on the part of the crew, but Russian experts working with the Mozambican authorities claimed the pilot was lured to disaster by a decoy navigation beacon.

Now there are reports that investigators have found detailed new evidence, including a sworn statement from a military intelligence agent of the apartheid era, plus documents, photographs and voice recordings.

The South African apartheid regime carried out a series of military strikes in Mozambique and other Africa states in the 1980’s. 

Rwanda genocide - a journalist gaoled

A Rwandan journalist has been gaoled for life for encouraging Hutus to slaughter Tutsis during the 1994 genocide in the country which saw 800,000 people massacred in just 100 days.

Valerie Bemeriki was a leading broadcaster on Radio Mille Collines which played a key role in inciting and orchestrating the slaughter. Two senior executives from the station had already been imprisoned.

Ms Bemeriki is alleged to have urged Hutu extremists not to shoot “these cockroaches” but instead hack them to pieces with a machete. And it is said that some victims actually had to pay their murderers to kill them by the bullet.

Meanwhile Rwanda has accused other African states of harbouring genocide suspects. It claims “hundreds” are sheltering in Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia. See also my blogs of March 1, 4, April 9, July 16, Sept 23, Oct 8, 30.