Nome de código: 'Rumba'

  Casadei pode ser a chave sobre a morte de Samora Machel

(...) So we have a motive and a contaminated investigation. But let’s go one step further and look for a suspect, a modus operandi and a smoking gun. For that we travel to Italy to meet 'Rumba' - Umberto Fusaroli Casadei.

If you saw Casadei walking down the street, you would hardly give him a second glance. He looks like every other kindly old Italian man you find in the villages of Italy, who adores his grandchildren and passes the days hanging out at the local espresso bars or cheering for his favourite soccer team. But behind this apparent ordinariness is a remarkable story. He has rubbed shoulders with some of Africa’s greatest leaders and survived more than one assassination attempt.

* * *

Casadei was just 16 years old when he was forced to watch his father and two uncles being publicly executed by Franco Mussolini’s fascists during World War II in northern Italy. This scarred him for life, and he vowed then to fight oppression in every corner of the globe.

It was this that led him to Samora Machel, whom he fought with against the Portuguese colonialists. After independence he became one of Machel’s most trusted lieutenants, operating in the dangerous world of counter- espionage. Casadei was a double agent, pretending to work for South African military intelligence (MI) while secretly passing crucial information directly to Machel. He was paid R600 a month by South Africa for his false MI reports, money that ironically went straight into Mozambican government coffers.

One of his regular contacts was a female MI agent whom he has identified but asked that we call simply “Maureen”. It was during a routine meeting with Maureen that Casadei stumbled on the information that South African and Mozambican agents were plotting to kill Machel.

He described how “she asked me if the South Africans could trust the Mozambicans. Because they had asked the South Africans: if they assisted in killing Samora, what would the South Africans do to help those who’d assisted in the murder to take over power in Maputo?”

Now that he knew the identities of the Mozambican officials planning on betraying their leader, Casadei went straight to Machel and begged him to let him kill the two generals. “Samora now knew who was plotting against him, but he refused [to let] me kill them, he did not give me the permit to kill them. And so he gave them time to kill him. This was the big problem,” said Casadei, shaking his head regretfully.

It was not long after this that the crash occurred.

Devastated by the loss of one of his dearest friends, Casadei dedicated himself to investigating the cause of the crash. By 1994 he had collected enough information to go public with his story, speaking out in Mozambican radio interviews and newspaper articles. He linked top Mozambican and South African government officials to the conspiracy to kill Machel and provided critical technical information.

He paid a heavy price for his courage. Assassins opened fire on him on two occasions. The first time, convinced they’d killed him as he sat at the wheel of his Landrover, they taunted him by saying the bullets were a message from the Mozamibican generals he’d named as accomplices in the president’s murder. But he survived, driving himself, badly wounded, to hospital.

Several months later another round of bullets was emptied into Casadei’s body and again miraculously he survived. But by now things had become too dangerous, and this time he was forced to flee Mozambique and return to the town of his birth in Northern Italy.

Casadei’s story is reinforced by a foreign intelligence document from a neighbouring country in the possession of Radio 702. The document names the Malawian, Mozambican and South African agents who conspired in the plot to kill Machel. The Mozambicans named in the report are the very same ones who sent assassins to kill Casadei.

The document states that South Africa was charged with the responsibility of overseeing the technical aspects of the crash. Senior South African generals and a Cabinet minister are named in the report.

South African military intelligence was given the task of recruiting an airport official from Mozambique. According to the report, the airport official was paid a total of R1,5- million to assist the South Africans by switching off either the Maputo radar system or the beacon.

The report states that this person “travelled to Zimbabwe to close the deal with his foreign counterparts with the help of a Mozambican official who got him a medical certificate to justify his absence. Payments were made in two parts ... After the deal the Malawians and the South Africans started to monitor the control tower and the communications in it.”

The airport official would later ensure that the Maputo beacon and radar system was/were switched off, making it easier to operate a decoy beacon transmitting a signal on the same wavelength as the Maputo beacon.

Radio 702 is in possession of the dates those payments were made and the banking institutions where the money was deposited. However, this could not be double-checked because the banks concerned do not keep records going that far back.

'O PODER NÃO SE PARTILHA, EXERCE-SE! O PODER, TAMBÉM É ISSO, SOLIDÃO!' - Samora Machel

O PODER CORROMPE. O PODER ABSOLUTO, CORROMPE ABSOLUTAMENTE - os seus 'herdeiros' políticos trataram de aplicar o axioma depois da solidão a que se remeteu Machel.