
Since yesterday's post I've checked Google Maps - most maps of Maputo show only the wealthier inner suburbs, an area maybe five kilometres square - and discovered my idea of distances was completely naive. Our office is at least ten kilometres from Malhazine. The market where Catarina was dodging shrapnel can't be less than eight kilometres away from the site of the explosions.




The psychiatric hospital at Infulene.
Another target was the electricity substation at Infulene, which provides power to much of southern Mozambique, including the northern bairros of Maputo. So to make matters worse for the people fleeing Malhazine on Thursday night, they did so in a blackout.


Our operations chief Trudi told me yesterday about a client for whom she'd written off a loan. He had run a barraca, an informal restaurant, attached to his house. Both the house and barraca had been destroyed.Damage to the walls and floor in the Russian embassy compound at Coop, about eight kilometres from Malhazine - an indication of the power of the explosions.
My Ukrainian colleague Valentin remarked acidly, "It's returning to its source." The Malhazine arsenal was originally built with Soviet expertise in the mid 1980s, and much of the weaponry stored there was obsolete Soviet-made munitions from the era of the war of destabilisation (1975-1992).
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