French prosecutors said Saturday they had opened a manslaughter investigation against energy giant TotalEnergies following a bloody 2021 jihadist attack in Mozambique.
In October 2023, survivors and relatives of victims of the attack near a major gas field in northern Mozambique launched legal action against the oil and gas giant, accusing it of failing to protect its subcontractors.
Islamic State-linked militants killed dozens of people when they attacked the port town of Palma in March 2021, sending thousands of people fleeing into the surrounding forest.
The attack in Cabo Delgado province lasted several days. Some of the victims were beheaded.
The investigation into involuntary manslaughter and failure to assist persons in danger was launched on Friday, the prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, west of Paris, told AFP.
TotalEnergies halted its $20 billion LNG project after the attack but is hoping to restart it.
There was no immediate reaction from TotalEnergies.
In a statement released at the time the complaint was filed in 2023, the company had “strongly rejected these accusations.”
Seven British and South African complainants — three survivors and four relatives of victims — accuse TotalEnergies, which was known as Total in 2021, of failing to take steps to ensure the safety of subcontractors before the assault.
The criminal complaint filed in 2023 accuses TotalEnergies, which was developing a liquefied natural gas project at Afungi near Palma, of involuntary manslaughter and failure to assist persons in danger.
Mozambique’s government said around 30 people were killed but Alex Perry, an independent journalist who carried out a five-month investigation into the massacre, counted 1,402 people dead or missing, including 55 Total contractors.
The Al-Shabab group (no link to the Somali group of the same name) which carried out the attack had been active in Cabo Delgado province since 2017.
Total is also accused of refusing to provide fuel to a South African security company that organised helicopter rescues from a besieged hotel during the attack.
The company eventually ran out of fuel, leaving people stranded inside.
Janik Armstrong, a Canadian whose husband Adrian Nel was killed in the siege, told reporters in 2023 how he held out under siege for two days at Amarula Lodge, with 150 others “waiting for a rescue by Total or the Mozambican security forces that never came.”
She said when they realised that “they had been abandoned”, they tried to break out in a convoy of cars but came under fire from the gunmen, who killed her husband.
TotalEnergies has said that “all the staff of Mozambique LNG and its contractors and subcontractors had been evacuated”, mostly by boat.
The company also insisted it had supplied fuel for the rescue operation.
The attack triggered the deployment of forces from Rwanda and southern African countries which have since helped Mozambique retake control of much of Cabo Delgado.
TotalEnergies is hoping to restart the long-delayed project, and this week the US Export-Import Bank approved a $4.7 billion loan for the company.
TotalEnergies has a 26.5 percent stake in the project, which aims to export gas mainly to clients in Asia.
Several NGOs issued a joint statement on Friday calling other European and Asian financiers “to refuse to follow this toxic and irresponsible lead and to oppose the restart of the project, a climate bomb associaach ted with numerous allegations of human rights violations.”
