Police have arrested the stepson of former Malawi President Peter Mutharika (2014-2020) as part of an investigation into the discovery last month of a mass grave in the Mzimba district in the north of the African country.
Police spokesman Peter Kalaya confirmed the arrest of Tadikira Mafubza after he himself went to one of the barracks in the capital, Lilongwe, to turn himself in after several days of trying to find him.
«We have solid evidence linking Tadikira to the Mzimba mass grave. We had been looking for him for the last three days and he decided to turn himself in,» said Kalaya in statements reported by the Maravi Post news portal.
Last October authorities found a mass grave inside the Mtangatanga Forest Reserve in Mzimba, where the bodies of some 30 Ethiopian nationals – all men between 24 and 40 years of age – were found, according to preliminary investigations.
In recent years, Malawi has been a transit point for illegal immigration to South Africa, the United States and Europe. In 2022, more than 220 people have been intercepted by the authorities, most of them coming from Ethiopia, which has been in conflict with the separatist region of Tigray since 2020.
The former president Mutharika has not commented for the moment on the arrest, but his political party, the Democratic Progressive Party, has included what happened in the particular witch-hunt against him and his family that the new ruling elites of the country are carrying out.
In 2020, the High Court of Malawi sentenced the former Minister of Home Affairs Uladi Mussa and an immigration officer to five years in prison for irregularities in the issuance of passports and documentation.
