The soldiers separated the villagers by gender and stripped them of their money and phones. Around 180 people, mostly men, were crammed into two shipping containers. A woman gave birth beside the doors. No one was given food or water. Then, over three months, the soldiers took most of the men away and executed them.

These scenes — detailed in a human rights report commissioned by the Netherlands — lay out further evidence that Mozambican government soldiers in the pay of TotalEnergies were responsible for a 2021 massacre first revealed by POLITICO.

They are based on the testimony of four witnesses to a July-September 2021 massacre in the makeshift gatehouse of a vast gas plant being built by the French energy giant in northern Mozambique. Only 26 of the imprisoned men would survive. 

Released this week as the British and Dutch governments announced they were pulling some $2.2 billion in support for the gas plant, the collected accounts closely match those from a 2024 investigation by POLITICO. They pile further pressure on a project already plagued by a local insurgency and two criminal cases. 

On Tuesday, after the release of the report, TotalEnergies said its stance on the massacre remained unaltered. It has previously claimed its own “extensive research” into the allegations has “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.”

The four accounts — from a survivor, a person who knew one of those detained, and two eyewitnesses — were collected independently of each other and from POLITICO, which was not informed that the government-funded think tank Clingendael was reinvestigating the atrocity. 

They will provide further ammunition for a criminal complaint alleging that TotalEnergies was complicit in war crimes because it “directly financed and materially supported” Mozambican soldiers protecting its compound from an ISIS-linked insurgency. 

The company has said it “firmly rejects all such accusations.”

In March, a French state prosecutor also announced the opening of a formal criminal investigation into TotalEnergies over allegations of involuntary manslaughter at its Mozambican operation. 

At the center of that inquiry is an accusation that, three months before the container killings, the company abandoned contractors who were building its gas plant to a devastating ISIS attack in March 2021 on the adjacent town of Palma.

A house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO found 1,354 civilians were killed in that attack, 330 of them beheaded. Other reporting established that 55 of those dead were from TotalEnergies’ workforce. The company, which has claimed it lost none of its workforce during the attack, denies the accusations.

Widespread abuse

The Dutch report indicates the container massacre was part of a systematic pattern of mass rape and execution in reprisal for the ISIS attack carried out by the army against villagers living around TotalEnergies’ plant. 

With ISIS militants roaming the area for weeks after their attack on Palma, 25,000 to 30,000 people sought shelter outside Total’s gates, which “exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation,” the report reads. 

“By June 2021, the situation had become catastrophic, with people (including many children) reported to be dying on a daily basis due to starvation, disease or a lack of medical treatment,” the report reads. The army’s response was to steal aid, and sell looted food at inflated prices.

It was also at this point that an army “unable to distinguish ‘villagers’ from ‘terrorists,’” took its revenge on the civilian population. 

“Villagers reported discovering bodies in surrounding farmland, widely believed to be victims of [army] violence,” reads the report.  “Eyewitnesses also reported cases of sexual violence. In [one village], locals described drunk soldiers entering homes without permission and raping women.” 

In another village, a random survey of 60 households found that 57 percent of them had at least one member who had been killed. 

Those crammed by the soldiers into the containers endured three months of physical abuse, according to the report. According to the survivor, one day a large group was taken away. “Others were removed in smaller groups, never to return. The survivor believes that they were interrogated and executed.” 

Upon their release, a survivor said that a soldier told them never to talk about the killings. “Those who died, died — it was war,” the soldier said. “If anyone asks, say the others were in different containers and are still coming.”

In May, an investigation by U.K. Export Finance, which had pledged to lend Total’s project $1.15 billion, heard directly from two of the 26 survivors of the atrocity via video calls from Mozambique. The British state lender has not yet made its findings public.

Total’s project in Mozambique has an estimated cost of $20.5 billion. It is part of a wider natural gas development that, at $50 billion, was once hailed as the largest private investment ever made in Africa.

Proceeding as planned

In the wake of the Dutch report, human rights and environmental campaigners called on TotalEnergies to reconsider its project in the light of the loss of life and abuse.

“It has been blatantly clear for years that this project is a disaster for local communities and for the climate,” said Antoine Bouhey of Reclaim Finance.

Adam McGibbon of Oil Change International called on other lenders to “pull out too and put an end to this nightmare project forever.”

On Tuesday, TotalEnergies said its gas project was proceeding as planned and that its other lenders had “unanimously agreed to provide additional equity” to fill the shortfall created by the British and Dutch withdrawal.