Victims, survivors sue TotalEnergies over 2021 terror attack in Mozambique

Seven survivors and relatives of victims have launched a legal action against French company TotalEnergies for “involuntary manslaughter and failure to assist a person in danger” following a bloody 2021 Islamic State-linked jihadist attack in northern Mozambique.
Victims and their families accuse the French energy giant, which ran a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project near Palma, of acts of negligence, of not having ensured the safety of its subcontractors during the attack, their lawyers said Tuesday (10 October). Islamic State-linked militants killed dozens of people when they attacked the Mozambican port town of Palma in March 2021, sending thousands fleeing into the surrounding forest. The attack in Cabo Delgado province lasted several days, during which the militants hunted people in the town and forest. Some of the victims were beheaded. Some employees of the company were among the more than 1,000 killed or missing.
Mozambique’s government said around 30 people were killed in the attack but, this figure is disputed by Alexander Perry, an independent journalist, who investigated for five months in Palma, and found that the toll is 1,402 civilians dead or missing, including 55 subcontractors of the Total group. The plaintiffs accuse TotalEnergies, which was still known as Total in 2021, of failing to properly assess the threat to people working on the massive gas project. “And yet the danger was known. Several villages had already been attacked before the Palma attack, and there was a real jihadist threat,” their lawyer Henri Thulliez argued. Total rival ExxonMobil had pulled out of the project in 2019 over what it saw as the excessive threat from the insurgents in the area.