Her severed head was placed in front of their door. Her tongue had been cut out punishment for daring to talk back to the insurgents terrorizing northern Mozambique.
Two years after her sister-in-law’s death, the scene still haunts Zara Alifa Assumane, 62.
She fled her home in Mocimboa da Praia after the killing and now lives in a camp in Montepuez, 150km away.
“I’m still terrified, I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said, her hair wrapped with a red-chilli-patterned headscarf.
When the militants showed up near her home, they ordered everyone outside.
“My sister-in-law spoke back to them, so they decapitated her,” Assumane