Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Key Findings + The abduction of journalist Arlindo Chissale is part of a broader pattern of enforced disappearances and political killings in Mozambique, with over 300 dead and 3,000 victims of violence from October 2024 to January 2025; Our reporting suggests actors close to Mozambique’s ruling party FRELIMO were involved in the surveillance and targeting of opposition members ; Forbidden Stories found that the 2016 abduction of Américo Sebastião, a Portuguese businessman who disappeared in the Sofala region, may have involved a member of Mozambican security forces. On the morning of January 7th, 2025, it was hot and muggy in Pemba, Mozambique. Arlindo Chissale, a 46-year-old reporter and editor of Pinnacle News , an online community journalism outlet with over 70,000 followers, boarded a bus. He was bound for Nacala, a town eight hours south, where he worked at a graveyard. (Like many journalists in the region, Chissale could not afford to live solely from his journalism salary and held several jobs.) During Chissale’s journey to Nacala, a white unmarked car suddenly blocked the road. Five men, two reportedly wearing police uniforms, dragged Chissale out of the vehicle, beat him, shoved him into the car, and drove away, according to a UN report . Nearly a year and a half after his abduction, Chissale’s fate remains unknown. Credit: Tiktok His peers described Chissale as a fearless community reporter and an expert on his home region of Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique. Chissale had dedicated his life to documenting the struggles of his community, which in recent years had been beset by the violent Islamist insurgency Al-Shabab, mounting state-led military operations, and billion-dollar Western-backed gas extraction projects. The region has seen activists, reporters, and opposition members increasingly targeted or abducted in a pattern of attacks attributed to state-led armed groups. Chissale himself was a vocal member of the rising opposition, which threatened the governing party Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO)’s 51-year-long reign. Credit: Amancio Miguel / VOA Portugues, 2023. For five months, more than 30 journalists from 10 media organizations collaborated to expose the state-sponsored machinery of repression that Chissale had denounced for years, and that may have been implicated in his disappearance. The consortium’s reporting suggests Chissale’s abduction was part of a broader pattern of political persecution, with dozens of cases pointing to opposition members being targeted by actors linked to FRELIMO and Mozambique’s security forces, particularly in the aftermath of the October 2024 general elections. Allegations of Electoral Fraud “Chissale handled communications [within the opposition], but he also had political ambitions,” Venâncio Mondlane, head of the opposition party National Alliance for a Free and Autonomous Mozambique (ANAMOLA) and former presidential candidate, told the consortium. But around the 2024 general elections, which re-elected FRELIMO at both a presidential and parliamentary level, Chissale began publicly accusing the authorities of electoral fraud. “He communicated very clearly, and with remarkable eloquence, about the mechanics of electoral fraud, explaining how it was organized, teaching people how to identify it and how to fight it,” Mondlane said. This is why, Mondlane believes, “he was ultimately abducted.”. (The Mozambican authorities did not respond to Forbidden Stories’ questions regarding the case of Arlindo Chissale.) On October 21, 2024, Riot police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd in Maputo after supporters of opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane’s associates were shot dead (Credit: VOA Africa). The election results were heavily disputed by the opposition, sparking nationwide protests that plunged the country into turmoil. Despite a court order, the District Election Commission refused to hand over the official ta