French energy giant TotalEnergies was formally accused Monday of complicity in war crimes and torture in a criminal complaint filed in Paris over a massacre at its Mozambique gas plant, first uncovered by a POLITICO investigation last year.
The complaint, filed by the legal nonprofit the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” Mozambican soldiers protecting its compound from an ISIS-linked insurgency.
As POLITICO revealed, the soldiers, based inside TotalEnergies’ concession just south of the Tanzanian border, brutalized, starved, suffocated, executed or disappeared around 200 men in its gatehouse from June to September 2021.
“TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its own facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group of lawyers specializing in international law.
