The shipping containers were a familiar sight to the villagers of northern Mozambique’s remote and troubled Afungi peninsula: a dozen steel boxes lined up end-to-end with a guarded gate in the middle. They formed a makeshift barricade at the entrance to an enormous natural gas plant that the French energy giant TotalEnergies was building in a region plagued by a violent Islamist insurgency.
The villagers had been caught in the crossfire between the Mozambican army and Islamic State group-affiliated militants. Having fled their homes, they had gone to seek the protection of government soldiers. Instead, they found horror.
The soldiers accused the villagers of being members of the insurgency. They separated the men — a group of between 180 and 250 — from the women and children. Then they crammed their prisoners into the shipping containers on either side of the entrance, hitting, kicking and striking them with rifle butts.
The soldiers held the men in the containers for three months. They beat, suffocated, starved, tortured and finally killed their detainees. Ultimately, only 26 prisoners survived.
