Military vehicle mows down woman in Maputo amid election protests

A military vehicle has mown down a woman in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, as protests grip the southern African country weeks after an election that the opposition said was rigged.

Videos of the incident on Wednesday that have been widely shared on social media showed an armoured vehicle speeding down a busy street into a makeshift wooden barricade attended by protesters and plastered with a picture of the opposition leader, Venâncio Mondlane, who claimed he won the 9 October election, and then driving over the woman.

She sustained head injuries but was not in danger of dying, the director of the emergency department at Maputo central hospital said on Thursday.

Mozambique’s armed forces said in a statement that it “accidentally ran over a citizen” and would take responsibility for her medical care at the hospital. “The [armed forces] deeply regrets what happened,” it said. “The incident will be rigorously investigated to ensure that this type of situation does not happen again.”

Police also shot and killed two protesters on Wednesday in the northern city of Nampula, after a crowd that had barricaded a road and burned tyres confronted officers sent to break up the protest, an activist said.

Mozambique has been gripped by weeks of protests after the elections, in which Daniel Chapo, the presidential candidate of the Frelimo party, which has ruled the southern African country since 1975, secured 70.7% of the vote, according to official results.

Mondlane, who captured the imagination of many of the fast-growing country’s young voters and has since fled abroad, was said to have won just 20.3% of the vote. He called for people to block traffic from 8am to 4pm, from Tuesday to Friday.

On Thursday, Mondlane’s supporters across the country continued to heed his call. On the highway leading from Maputo to South Africa’s border, women cooked pap, a staple maize porridge, plucked chickens and chopped lettuce for a salad.

On the road to the capital city’s international airport, there was a festive mood, with some protesters sitting on chairs around a steaming pot of pap and fish, while others chanted, sang and danced.

At least 10 children have been killed by security forces since late October, according to Human Rights Watch. The Centre for Democracy and Human Rights, a local civil society group, said last week it knew of 65 people killed by police.

“We want change in the country. We want to be free and … we no longer want to study just to stay at home with a diploma,” said Ancha Bai, a 30-year-old woman and informal mobile money processor protesting in the city centre.

“We’re fed up with this corrupt and oppressive regime. Frelimo has already stolen [the election], but enough is enough,” said a philosophy graduate who did not want to be named. “If I have to die, I’ll die here. I’d rather die in the protests than starve at home.”

On 19 October, lawyer Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe, a film-maker and opposition party Podemos official, were shot dead by unknown attackers. The deaths, for which no one has yet been arrested, fit a pattern of what human rights researchers have said are targeted killings of opposition figures without anyone being brought to justice.

“We strongly condemn the escalation of violence against civilians … This included an incident on 27 November in which a Mozambican security forces vehicle sped towards a group of people and brutally ran over a person,” the embassies of the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Switzerland said in a joint statement.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report