‘All must be beheaded’: Revelations of atrocities at French energy giant’s African stronghold

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This article is also available in: French

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 ISIS-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.

Through interviews with survivors and witnesses, and a door-to-door survey of the victims’ villages, I was able to reconstruct a detailed account of the atrocities carried out during the summer of 2021 by a commando unit led by an officer who said his mission was to protect “the project of Total.” 

News of the massacre can only add to the gathering sense of catastrophe that now surrounds a project that was once — together with the development of a second gas field by ExxonMobil — heralded as the biggest private investment ever made in Africa, with a total cost of $50 billion. 

Construction on the gas plant has been halted since 2021 when the Islamist rebels overran the region, massacring more than 1,000 people. French authorities are already investigating TotalEnergies’ management over the deaths of its contractors in that attack. 

This second bloodbath, reported here for the first time, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Mozambican military unit operating out of the TotalEnergies gatehouse. 

The energy company’s alliance with the Mozambican military inevitably raises questions over the leadership of TotalEnergies CEO and Chairman Patrick Pouyanné.

He had intended the Mozambican mega-project to be the showpiece of his ambitions for a low-carbon future. Instead, his strategy of high-stakes investments in unstable parts of the world now risks falling foul of mounting legal efforts to bring multinational corporations to international justice.

In assessing the company’s exposure, two questions are paramount: Was TotalEnergies aware it was working with torturers and murderers? And did it know — or should it have known — about the atrocities that took place in its containers?

Provided with a detailed summary of this article, Maxime Rabilloud, managing director of Mozambique LNG, TotalEnergies’ subsidiary in the country, said his operation had “no knowledge of the alleged events described” nor “any information indicating that such events took place.” 

He also said the company had no presence on the ground at the time of the killings, having handed over the gas plant to Mozambican security forces. “Nevertheless, given the gravity of the allegations, we are taking your message very seriously,” he added.

I first came to Mozambique in September 2021 to investigate the rebel attack on Palma, just north of the gas plant, in March and April that year. 

By then, the petroleum industry and the insurgency had been growing side by side on the Afungi peninsula for years. In 2010, some of the earth’s largest deposits of natural gas were discovered 25 miles (40 kilometers) offshore. Seven years later, an Islamist radical born on the peninsula named Bonomade Machude Omar began a war against the government which, corrupt and repressive, had long neglected the north.

Over the next few years, these two opposing forces changed the area beyond recognition. The state gave a consortium of gas companies led by the Texan firm Anadarko the right to redevelop a swath of land slightly larger than Manhattan. The company bulldozed farms and villages — including fields belonging to Omar’s native Ncumbi — and replaced them with a giant liquefaction plant, a port, an airport and cabins for 15,000 workers. 

Approximately 2,500 people living in the area were relocated into a new purpose-built town of concrete bungalows. 

In 2019, when Anadarko sold out to Occidental Petroleum, Total picked up its African assets, becoming the lead operator of a group that included investors from India, Japan, South Africa and Thailand.

The French oil and gas major’s first task was to ring the land it had been granted with a 12-foot-high double security fence dotted with watchtowers. To defend it, the company set up the Joint Task Force, a rotating presence of some 700 Mozambican soldiers, commandos and paramilitary police — paid, equipped and accommodated by Total. 

Soon this vast and secretive fortress at the ends of the earth had acquired a nickname: Totalandia.

The heightened security was necessary. Omar’s group, by now known as al-Shabab, was killing thousands of people per year across the surrounding province, many in mass beheadings. It had driven roughly a million people from their villages. 

Among the group’s targets was the gas industry, which had promised the province just 0.4 percent of gas revenues. In regular attacks on traffic moving in and out of the gas plant, al-Shabab killed a dozen construction workers.

Then on March 24, 2021, the Islamist group launched a full-scale attack on Palma, which served as a base of operations for many of TotalEnergies’ construction workers. The Mozambican security services and almost all of Palma’s 60,000 residents fled. At the gas plant, Total’s staff also evacuated, while the Joint Task Force for the most part stayed put inside the fence.

A group of 183 contractors and civilians holed up at the Amarula hotel in Palma for two days. Then, realizing no help was coming, they broke out in a 17-car convoy. Six cars didn’t make it. Ten people were killed. For months afterward, insurgents roamed the area, stealing pickups and food, and staging mass killings. When the Mozambican security forces finally retook the town in June and July 2021, they found its streets strewn with bodies.

In my reporting on the Palma massacre, I documented the deaths of 55 construction workers: 53 Mozambicans, one South African and one Briton. But there was no official count — neither by the government nor TotalEnergies — of the casualties among its project workers or the far larger numbers of dead among ordinary people in Palma and its surrounding villages.

In the absence of a comprehensive death toll, I consulted United Nations guidelines on how to establish one. In late 2022, I set up a survey team of six researchers and three managers. Over five months, the team visited 13,686 homes in Palma and 15 nearby villages, on the peninsula and north of Palma. They found a total of 1,193 dead or missing, including 330 beheaded, and 209 abducted and never seen again. 

An audit by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a global nonprofit collecting data on conflicts, later examined my methodology, compared my findings with its own research and confirmed the figures, adding 105 deaths of its own. Including the dead contractors, that made 1,562 killed or kidnapped.

The revelation of the Palma massacre sparked outrage, not least because TotalEnergies and the Mozambican authorities refused to acknowledge its full extent. Human rights groups demanded an investigation, and environmentalists called for the Afungi plant to be abandoned. 

“All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Rabilloud told POLITICO in his statement, repeating the company’s position in the years since the attack. “Furthermore, Mozambique LNG also evacuated many civilians thanks to its personnel who remained at the site as long as safely possible to keep the port and airport in operation.”

But last October, a group of survivors from the Amarula hotel and the families of two men who died in the convoy sued the oil and gas giant in Paris for not assisting a rescue, hindering that rescue and involuntary manslaughter. 

In response, TotalEnergies issued a statement saying it “categorically rejects these allegations” and said it was unaware that thousands of plant workers were in Palma during the attack. “No contractor has informed Mozambique LNG of the presence of employees outside the Afungi site,” Rabilloud said. In May, the French state prosecutor’s office announced it was examining that case to determine whether it would formally investigate TotalEnergies.

This was the context when late last year one of my survey managers on a visit to Afungi’s villages reported hearing about an additional set of killings.

These had taken place as the Mozambican army was retaking Palma and the Afungi peninsula in 2021, but they were of a very different nature. This time, the massacre hadn’t been carried out by Islamists but by Mozambican commandos based at TotalEnergies’ gas plant.

Sneaking back into Palma — the authorities were denying journalists access — I spoke to two survivors of this new atrocity. A few weeks after that, I was banned from reentering Mozambique. But since then, I have interviewed another 10 survivors by video call, as well as one of the workers present at the plant at the time of the killing. All 13 accounts match.

One of my first interviewees was Maria, 60, from Ncumbi. (I’ve used only first names or pseudonyms to protect those I spoke to from reprisals.) Maria was a farmer who had resisted selling her land to the gasmen. After the Palma attack, she was just as unwilling to cede it to rebels rampaging across the peninsula. Instead, she and 500 others — longtime residents and people displaced by the war — stayed put, ready to run to their farms or deep into the bush at a moment’s notice. 

On the night of June 21, 2021, when the group heard what they took to be approaching al-Shabab gunfire, it was with practiced efficiency that the women ran for their sleeping infants, the men gathered their chickens and goats, and whole families abandoned their homes to camp out in the hinterland until the danger passed.

After a week, texts began circulating from the Mozambican army warning it was planning a counterattack against al-Shabab and advising civilians to seek sanctuary at a military base at Patacua, a village close to the main entrance of the Afungi gas plant.

“They were so polite,” recalled Mwamba, 32, who had gone into hiding with Maria along with his wife and three children. “‘All of you, we have to take you to Patacua for assistance.’”

Hundreds of men, women and children walked north to Patacua, arriving on July 1. There they found soldiers wearing the red berets of Mozambique’s commandos. “We all felt safe running there,” said father-of-two Assumane, 39. “[Soldiers] are supposed to protect us.”

Initially, the commandos took names, ages, addresses and employment details. But it was clear that civilian safety was not their mission. 

The soldiers were openly suspicious of this ragtag group emerging from the bush. They divided men from women and children. They then began searching the women for “money we were taking from al-Shabab,” said Maria — a pretext for systematic sexual assault. “They would put their fingers on their vaginas and push around,” said Timo, 27, a farmer and father of nine. 

The violence of the abuse left some women unable to walk, Timo said. One heavily pregnant woman gave birth. “We tried to shield her,” Maria said. “We said, ‘Please don’t come here — she’s having a baby.’ They refused. They said, ‘No, we need to see what’s happening.’” When Maria tried to wash the woman, the soldiers threatened to beat her.

Meanwhile, the soldiers accused all the men — a group of 180-250 aged from 18 to 60 — of belonging to al-Shabab. The soldiers stripped them of identity documents, phones and money, whipped them with thorn branches and threatened to kill them. “We don’t want any boy or man [left alive],” Mwamba heard a soldier say. “No matter how old he is. All must be beheaded.”

A clutch of armored army trucks arrived. The commandos loaded the men aboard for the short journey to Cuatro Camino, a crossroads directly in front of the entrance to TotalEnergies’ plant — an area identified in a Total report as under the protection of the Joint Task Force, the security force set up by the company.

Disembarking, the men found themselves standing before the makeshift gatehouse. The soldiers formed two lines, then herded the men into the two containers. All 11 survivors I spoke to said at least two villagers were beaten to death at this point. They identified one of the dead as an old man from Patacua called Mwako, whom the soldiers accused of being a rebel commander.

“Everybody knew that was a lie,” said Meejai, 27, a father of two, and one of a dozen people who saw the fatal beating. “Those guys, they wanted money. ‘Shabab’ was just a word they used [to get it].” Mwako’s body was taken back to his family in Patacua. 

Weeks later, Moussa, 65, a peanut farmer with 10 grandchildren, was among a group ordered to bury the other victims. He counted five bodies, all badly decomposed and partially eaten by dogs.

The women were released after a day or two. But for the next three months, the soldiers kept the men locked in the windowless metal containers in 30-degree Celsius (85 degrees Fahrenheit) heat. So packed in were they, said Amadi, 23, a father of one, that “we couldn’t even sit. We had to stand up, like dried fish.”

There were no toilets, forcing the men to soil themselves. The soldiers starved their prisoners of food and water for days on end. When they relented, supplies were limited to a fistful of rice and a sip of water from a bottle cap. 

“People would faint,” said Salimo, 28. “We couldn’t breathe.” Bihari, 56, a father of six originally from Mocimboa da Praia, a rebel-held city an hour’s drive to the south, said: “We had to climb on each other’s shoulders to lick condensation from the ceiling.”

In the first few days, passing soldiers from other units would observe what was happening. Some joined in. Others objected. “You shouldn’t do this,” Assumane heard one say. “You have to recognize that they are human beings.” An officer who spoke Makua, the local language, gradually secured the release of several dozen men, eventually including Salimo, by corroborating details about their civilian life. But then that soldier left.

With their other prisoners, the commandos settled into a routine of abuse. They would work in shifts, arriving from inside TotalEnergies’ compound in the morning, or from bunks set up in a neighboring container, to resume a steady schedule of beatings and torture. “That became our normal life,” Bihari said.

As time passed, the soldiers became more inventive. They held knives to their prisoners’ throats and threatened to behead them. They brought them out of the containers to lie on the ground on their backs, looking up at the sun for hours. They made them strip and kiss each other. 

One man who tried to run “was shot and beheaded,” Bihari said. The same fate awaited anyone else who tried to escape, the soldiers warned. “It’s better that you are killed here,” they said.

And killing them they now were. One day, the doors opened to reveal a plainclothes officer whom Salimo recognized as a man who had taken down names and addresses at Patacua. “He told us he wanted some guys to go with him to help him to dig a hole where they could push trash,” Salimo said. “You couldn’t say no. Fifteen people were taken away to dig the trash.” Those 15 were never seen again. 

Three days later, the same thing, with another group. This time, Salimo said, “it was very clear that they were being taken to be killed.” The soldiers placed empty rice sacks over the men’s heads. They beat and stabbed them as they led them away.

In time, these trips to the trash pile became regular, too. “They were just taking people randomly,” said Figo, 26, a trader. “Like, ‘You, you and you.’” The soldiers had a code for when a new round of executions was due: It’s time to chop wood. “It means: Kill them,” Maria said.

Inside the containers, Moussa said, “our number was going down. One day, this container. Two days after, the other. They didn’t say why. They just kept doing it until we were almost finished.” By September 2021, of the original 180-250 prisoners, Moussa said, “only 26 of us were left.”

The survivors were finally released that month when they were discovered by the Rwandan army, which had been deployed to fight al-Shabab under a three-way deal between Mozambique, Rwanda and France. 

Transferred to a police base for several weeks, the villagers were driven home by the police commander’s wife on November 11, 2021. On their arrival, the commander’s wife called everyone together. “Those who can see their children, their son, their daughter, here they are,” she said. “Those who can’t see their children, I’m sorry.” 

Salimo, who witnessed his fellow prisoners’ return, remembers the moment. “They said: ‘Those who can’t see their children, you must accept it. These are the only ones who survived. This was war, and war is like that.” 

Assumane, who was released after helping bury Mwako, searched in vain for his 21-year-old son. “They said, ‘You have to forget about him.’ We tried to ask if they were in prison, maybe somewhere else. We didn’t get an answer. We just cried.”

The village leaders understood the police’s advice as a threat of reprisal against anyone speaking out. They issued a local edict: No man caught up in the Afungi massacre was ever to talk about it. But the disappearance of so many is hard to hide; many of my interviewees said they were speaking to me out of an undimmed sense of injustice.

In early 2024, after several weeks of negotiation, the village leaders rescinded their earlier decree and allowed my surveyors to carry out a second door-to-door assessment in four villages on the Afungi peninsula — Ncumbi, Mondlane, Macanja and Patacua — recording the names, ages and genders of those killed in this fresh massacre, and the circumstances of their death.

All of us understood that this new survey could only ever be a partial account of what happened. Many traumatized families had moved away, as had nearly all those displaced by the war who had been staying in the area. But over three weeks, my researchers recorded the identities of 22 women and 75 men, aged 18 to 58 — a total of 97 people — who had been killed or “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again.

The soldiers had beaten nine to death, shot 10, suffocated 12 in the containers and disappeared 26. The remaining 40 were missing, presumed dead after last being seen in the army’s custody. The surveyors also found one woman gang-raped by six soldiers who had somehow survived.

Since becoming CEO and chairman of France’s biggest company in 2014, Patrick Pouyanné has grappled with the dilemma facing all 21st-century oil and gas bosses: How to square the world’s appetite for fossil fuels with its simultaneous demand for their elimination. 

His answer, outlined in speeches and public appearances over the years, has been a strategy of two parts: to prioritize natural gas, which emits half the carbon of coal when burned, as a “transition” fuel; and to operate whenever possible outside the restrictive legal environments of North America and Europe.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout — which killed 11 crewmen and whose oil slick devastated hundreds of miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline — was a pivotal moment for the fossil fuel business, Pouyanné told an audience in London in 2017. 

The “absolutely enormous” penalties of $62 billion to $142 billion (depending on the calculation used) imposed on the British energy giant BP heralded the arrival of what Pouyanné called a new, prohibitive “legal risk” of operating in places where fines of that magnitude might be imposed. 

Pouyanné’s solution was to seek out less-regulated territories in the Middle East, where the energy company’s origins lay, and Africa, the birthplace of Elf Aquitaine, the oil producer absorbed by Total in 1999. 

Operating in such areas often entailed higher political risk — corruption, instability, insurrection, Pouyanné acknowledged. But it was the kind of risk that Total, as one of the largest companies in the world, worth €150 billion, was well equipped to cope. The company’s sheer size also allowed it to diversify investments around the world, ensuring that no single project was large enough to sink the entire enterprise.

So it was that in May 2019, Pouyanné announced the centerpiece of his new strategy: the purchase of a 26.5 percent stake and the lead operator role in a giant gas field in a warzone on the far side of the planet. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he told the Atlantic Council in Washington a week later. 

“The advantage to be a major company with a very large balance sheet is that we can absorb this type of risk,” he said. Mentioning Papua New Guinea as “another nice place” in which Total was investing, he added: “[Neither] of them, even if there is a collapse, will put Total into danger.”

Pouyanné is described by friends and critics alike as an able, mercurial manager who runs his company as a top-down hierarchy. “For a company that large, it’s incredible how much is driven by Pouyanné,” said an American executive who has dealt with him. When the boss visited his pet project at Afungi in Feb. 2023, said a contractor, “it was like God was coming.”

The Afungi massacre, however, points to a risk Pouyanné seems to have failed to consider: the growing reach of international justice. In the past few decades, a loose global movement of lawyers from Europe and North America has set out to ensure that nowhere on earth is beyond the law. 

Initially, they used offenses under international law — such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide — and tried to persuade global institutions like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to prosecute them.

After that proved inadequate — the ICC has taken just 10 people to trial since it was founded in 2002 — the lawyers made a new push. Rather than try to secure convictions in international courts, they would take standard domestic criminal laws against murder, rape, kidnap and torture, and use a new legal principle — universal jurisdiction — to bring cases in any country with a functioning justice system.

In recent years, there have been many examples of energy companies being prosecuted for atrocities in precisely the kind of faraway lands favored by Pouyanné.

In 2022, after decades of delay, ExxonMobil was ordered to stand trial in the United States in a case brought by 11 Indonesian villagers for murder, rape and torture carried out by soldiers whom Exxon paid to guard a gas field in Aceh; Exxon settled the case in 2023. Also in 2022, Lafarge, a French cement maker, was fined $778 million by the U.S. Department of Justice for paying $6 million in bribes and protection money to ISIS in Syria.

Last September, the former chairman and chief executive of the former Lundin Oil, which has since changed names several times, went on trial in Stockholm. The company has been accused of complicity in atrocities perpetrated from 1999-2003 by Sudanese soldiers whom they asked to secure a drill site in what is now South Sudan. 

This June, a Florida court ordered the U.S. banana giant Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight Colombian men killed between 1997 and 2004 by a paramilitary death squad securing its facility.

The parallels to what happened in Afungi are clear. The commandos were based on TotalEnergies’ compound. They ran their detention-and-execution operation from the petroleum giant’s gatehouse. And while the Mozambican Ministry of Defense refuses to comment on the massacre or say whether the commandos were part of TotalEnergies’ Joint Task Force, an unnamed brigadier who commanded them told Mozambican state TV on July 3, 2021, that his mission was to defend Total. “The enemy came with intent of attacking, entering and occupying Afungi, the project of Total,” he said. “We advanced to hit back at the enemy [who] was still in the bush and seeking shelter in their hiding places.”

If prosecutors in France or elsewhere were to pursue a case against TotalEnergies, the question of the company’s liability would ultimately turn on its awareness. What did it know, or ought to have known, about the likelihood of its protectors committing atrocities? And what did it know, or be expected to know, about the Afungi massacre?

It probably wouldn’t be difficult to prove that TotalEnergies at least should have known its Mozambican defenders were capable of carrying out such an atrocity. The Mozambican army has a well-established record of human rights abuses and summary executions, as well as extortion, and drug, gem and rare animal parts smuggling, documented by human rights groups, Western diplomats and even the CIA. 

The army’s history of delinquency is especially pronounced in northern Mozambique. The region’s residents are mostly Swahili- or Makua-speaking Muslims and regarded with suspicion by the soldiers, who are mostly Portuguese-speaking Christian from the south of the country. 

According to a Western risk assessor who visited Afungi, ExxonMobil’s reluctance to repeat its Indonesian experience is a central reason why it is yet to take a final investment decision on its own gas field off Palma; pressing ahead would mean partnering with TotalEnergies in the gas concession and allying with the Mozambican military.

That TotalEnergies at least appreciated there was a risk of such an atrocity was implicit in its deal with the Joint Task Force, which specified that the company’s bonuses to the soldiers would be withdrawn if they committed abuses and required them to undergo human rights training.

Internal TotalEnergies documents from the time, obtained under a Freedom of Information request by ReCommon, an Italian environmental NGO, also show the company was aware of allegations that Mozambican soldiers in and around the gas plant were regularly committing abuses. 

The gas project’s environmental and social reports for the last two quarters of 2021 record “allegations of torture and intimidation of civilians by military members” and “intimidation and extortion events.” Though TotalEnergies claimed such incidents were declining, in its first report of 2022, it noted that soldiers appeared to have beaten to death two fishermen on the north shore of the Afungi peninsula, killings which might have “implications for the project” because of their proximity to its jetty.

The army’s use of shipping containers as prisons was also well known. I witnessed it on a trip with the Rwandan army to the province in September 2021 when a container on the docks at Mocimboa da Praia, just recaptured from al-Shabab, was opened to reveal a crowd of a dozen filthy, terrified civilian men. The Mozambican soldiers present gave every impression of conducting business as usual.

Additionally, TotalEnergies’ own human rights advisers have given the company unequivocal, public warnings on how the army’s misconduct could implicate it.

Total has “a responsibility to address potential impacts to which it is directly linked through its business relationships (e.g. with public security forces),” LKL International Consulting, a Montreal-based group of human-rights lawyers and conflict analysts, wrote in a human-rights due-diligence report published on the company’s website in December 2020.

According to LKL, the highest risks to civilians were from two sources: al-Shabab, and “interactions with the JTF [Joint Task Force].” Moreover, the advisers wrote, “the nature of the relationship with the JTF puts the project in a position of potentially contributing to adverse impacts on human rights that are caused by members of the JTF.”

In late 2022, Pouyanné appointed Jean-Christophe Rufin, an author, former vice president of Doctors Without Borders and ex-French diplomat, and Ingrid Glowacki, a consultant, to assess human rights around the gas plant. 

In their report, published by TotalEnergies, they were more explicit about the risks. In the context of a rebellion “rooted in strong inequalities,” “lack of trust in the state” and “many abuses committed by the armed forces and the police,” TotalEnergies’ links to the army were a liability, Rufin and Glowacki wrote in May 2023. 

“In the event of human rights violations, this link directly engages the responsibility of the consortium,” they added. The relationship “would have the effect … of making the project a party to the conflict. Any direct link between the consortium and the Mozambican army should be cut off.” [Authors’ emphasis.] In response, TotalEnergies reportedly ended direct payments to individual Joint Task Force soldiers, and now pays the government instead.

Establishing that TotalEnergies was aware of the massacre in its container could prove more difficult. The company pulled its personnel from the region following the attack on Palma and the atrocities are not mentioned in its internal reports. 

Rabilloud, the managing director of TotalEnergies’ subsidiary, said none of his staff returned to the site before November, leaving Afungi “under the control of Mozambican public security forces.”

There is also every suggestion that the commandos were acting as a rogue force, without the approval of comrades, senior Mozambican commanders, the Mozambican Ministry of Defense or TotalEnergies. 

But complicity in a crime is also an offense, established by the provision of material support to the perpetrators and either an intention that an offense be committed, or a recklessness as to its commission. 

Even allowing for the theoretical possibility that some of those rounded up were al-Shabab, torture and summary execution are still war crimes. And there are grounds for a prosecutor to think that Mozambique LNG and its parent company TotalEnergies had sufficient cause to investigate whether human rights abuses were being committed by its defenders in its absence.

Despite evacuating Afungi, TotalEnergies’ 2021 report on Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights states the company “maintained a strong security organization in Mozambique.” On my first visit to Afungi, days after the surviving container prisoners were freed, I found several hundred Mozambican soldiers and half a dozen security contractors living on site.

The prisoners had been held in the most public of places — the gas plant’s gatehouse — which the soldiers would have routinely passed. The survivors also say white contractors working at the site visited the containers several times, trying, unsuccessfully, to pass them food and water from the canteen. The worker at the gas plant I spoke to confirmed the visits. What was happening at the gatehouse was “common knowledge,” he said.

Extraordinarily, the commandos also broadcast a version of their activities on national television. On July 3, 2021, several survivors recalled the container doors being opened and three dozen men, including two of those I later interviewed — Figo and Bihari — being led out and onto a group of pickups.

Figo and Bihari initially feared the worst. But after being driven about a mile, they were made to disembark and sit in two lines on the ground. Shortly afterward, a reporter for Mozambican state TV arrived. “Are you al-Shabab?” the journalist asked. “No, we are not,” the men replied, according to Bihari. “Do you know al-Shabab?” the journalist tried again. “No,” the men said. “We don’t know them.”

A dispatch from what was described as the “Afungi special theater” aired on the national news that evening. The reporter claimed that Mozambican armed forces were taking the fight to al-Shabab and named the village of Mondlane as the scene of a major battle — though his story was illustrated by library footage of military training exercises, rather than any fighting. 

The report also featured an interview with the commando brigadier. After stating that his mission was to protect “the project of Total”, the officer added that the army prevailed despite resistance from al-Shabab. “It’s a big defeat [for them],” he said. “Preliminary reports are that we managed to slaughter 156 terrorists. I have no doubt that more than 200 were killed. These 39 men” — the camera cut to the container group, including Figo and Bihari — “were captured during combat, in a battle where we were exchanging fire with the enemy.”

This large battle, apparently within walking distance of Afungi, passed unmentioned in TotalEnergies’ reports and was not recorded by any other media or conflict monitor. When I showed a recording of the TV report to Bihari, he called it an elaborate but transparent fiction. “A fake,” he said. “A lie.”

Rabilloud’s response was forwarded to POLITICO by TotalEnergies’ Paris press department following a request for comment. Rabilloud, a former general counsel for TotalEnergies’ exploration and production division, took charge in Mozambique on Sept. 6, 2021, just as the commandos’ container operation was winding down. 

“During the period between April to November 2021, despite having no physical presence in Afungi, Mozambique LNG maintained close communication with local communities and made over 1,200 phone calls with community leaders, community facilitators and people affected by the project,” Rabilloud wrote. “None of these calls mentioned the alleged events.” 

Nor was the Afungi massacre reported via Mozambique LNG’s “grievance mechanism,” set up as part of its adherence to security and human rights standards, he said. Rabilloud added that more than 5,000 members of the Mozambican security forces had been given human rights training.

Provided with the same summary of this article that was given to TotalEnergies, the Mozambican ministry of defense and the Mozambican presidency did not reply to requests for comment.

For his part, Pouyanné has tried to make a virtue of his company’s relationship with the military, arguing security is rightly the responsibility of a sovereign state. The situation “is clear,” he told a French senate inquiry into TotalEnergies this May. “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate. But the security of Cabo Delgado [the surrounding province] is not the responsibility of TotalEnergies. It’s the responsibility of the state of Mozambique.” When asked by POLITICO, TotalEnergies declined to say whether Pouyanné’s recognition of responsibility for company premises applied to the massacre carried out there. 

In addition to sparking interest among prosecutors in France or elsewhere, the massacre will also likely stir unease among banks and state lenders from Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Africa and the U.S. who have agreed to back TotalEnergies’ Mozambican project with $14.9 billion in loans but have yet to hand over the money. 

Summarizing international concern in a strategy paper this year, the United States embassy in Maputo said that while deprivation and state repression lit the spark of the insurgency, the violence was accelerated by the belief that “natural resources have been exploited by outsiders, with profits from liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects … bringing little benefit to local communities.”

TotalEnergies’ customers are already fretting about the company’s Mozambican adventure, for different reasons. With Pouyanné hoping to formally restart work this year but not expecting to pump gas until 2028 or 2029, a standard two-decade gas purchase contract now risks running afoul of global commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Last December, Pertamina of Malaysia canceled its 20-year deal to take 9 percent of production from Afungi.

“The security situation is an absolute mess and getting worse,” said Marisa Lourenço, an independent risk assessor specializing in southern Africa. “There’s too much corruption. Too much organized crime. No state. No governance.” The economics have also become harder to justify. Since May 2019, when Total bought into Mozambique, gas prices have fallen sharply, from more than $3 per metric million British thermal unit to $1.91 by late August 2024. Meanwhile, project costs for the company have also risen by around a quarter, or $3.5-$4 billion. At the scale that TotalEnergies had once conceived Afungi, Lourenço said, Africa’s gas mega-project is “never going to happen. The numbers don’t add up.”

For their parts, TotalEnergies and Mozambique seem determined to allow no further disruption to the project on which Pouyanné’s grand strategy for 21st-century oil and gas rests, but which has so far cost his company billions and made it nothing in return. Anticipating a restart in the next few months, neither has recognized the atrocities at Palma or Afungi. They are also playing down the risk from a resurgent al-Shabab, which has recovered from its founder Omar’s death in battle in August 2023 to stage more than 300 attacks in the first half of this year. 

Little thought is spared for those caught up in the Afungi massacre, for whom the trauma endures. “Our brains are crazy,” Moussa said. Any hope that the gas would light up a bright future for the Afungi peninsula has also long since evaporated. 

“In our country, we have had many wars,” Maria said. “We had colonial war. We had civil war.” For a few years, her family made a “good life” in Ncumbi. “[But] today, we are running away from this.” Asked to explain everything that had happened, Maria said she had come to think of the rapes, torture and mass murders as “a kind of robbery.” 

“It is because of the wealth we have,” she said. “Because of the gas.”