Maputo, Jan. 26, 2026 (Lusa) - A team sent by Portugal, with members of the Judicial Police and the Institute of Forensic Medicine, is already working with the Mozambican investigation service on the investigation into the death of Portuguese citizen Pedro Ferraz, an official source said on Monday.
"I can confirm their arrival. We are working (...). Today, as soon as they arrived, they began their work," Hilário Lole, spokesperson for Mozambique's National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic), told Lusa.
A team composed of members of the Judicial Police (the country's main criminal investigation agency) and the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, sent by the Portuguese Government, arrived in Mozambique today to accompany the investigations into the death of Portuguese citizen Pedro Ferraz Reis, director of the Mozambican bank BCI.
According to Lole, "everything is going well" in the cooperation between the Portuguese and Mozambican authorities, and there may be "perhaps, in the end, some communication".
The team "will monitor the investigations into the death of businessman Pedro Ferraz Reis, in close cooperation with the judicial and police authorities," according to a joint statement released on Saturday by the Portuguese ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of justice.
The death of Pedro Ferraz shocked the Portuguese and Mozambican communities, and the willingness to cooperate with Portugal in the investigation is seen locally as positive and unusual.
Mozambique's Sernic told Lusa on Thursday that it has not yet closed the investigation into the Portuguese man's death and that proceedings are ongoing.
"According to the forensic report, as well as the evidence found at the scene, the layout of the evidence, there is no doubt that it was suicide. However, it is necessary to ascertain why it may have been suicide, as [the] suicide may have been provoked. So, there are these elements that still need to be ascertained," said Hilário Lole.
Sernic announced on Tuesday that the 56-year-old Portuguese man committed suicide in a hotel in Maputo, contradicting the police's initial version of the incident as a homicide.
According to the Mozambican investigative police, the Portuguese citizen and director of BCI bank, a subsidiary in Mozambique of the Portuguese state-owned group Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) bank and also the Portuguese BPI bank, took his own life in the bathroom of a luxury hotel in the centre of Maputo using sharp instruments, namely knives, and ingesting rat poison.
At the press conference, CCTV footage was shown of the Portuguese man buying the instruments and poison.
Previously, the spokesperson for the Police of the Republic of Mozambique (PRM) in the city of Maputo, Marta Pereira, stated that the Portuguese citizen's death was the result of homicide and that investigations were ongoing, based on CCTV footage from the hotel, adding that the crime took place on Monday at 11:46 p.m. and that it was "a voluntary homicide".
However, an online petition with more than 9,000 signatures to date points to "the inconsistency of the explanations" regarding the death of the Portuguese manager.
According to Sernic, on Monday, Pedro Correia left his workplace at 2:00 p.m. (12:00 p.m. in Lisbon) and headed home, where he took a knife. He then went to a shop on the Maputo waterfront to buy, among other items, two more knives, which were later found inside his car. He then went to another shop, where he bought rat poison, and "traces of this substance were found in his body" during the forensic examination.
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