MAPUTO – Rio Tinto has suspended coal exports from Mozambique's northwest Tete province due to security concerns after threats by the opposition Renamo party to disrupt the Sena railway line, a provincial official said on Wednesday.
"As for Rio Tinto's goods trains, the company decided to suspend them," Tete provincial governor Rachid Gogo told Radio Mozambique.
A Rio spokesman in Johannesburg was not immediately available for comment. Officials at Brazilian mining giant Vale, the other commercial user of the Sena line, were also unavailable.
Renamo, a former guerrilla movement that waged a 1975 to 1992 civil war, has threatened to renew hostilities against the ruling Frelimo party this year in an attempt to wring political concessions out of the government.
Last week it issued a public threat to disrupt traffic on arterial roads and the Sena line, the only railway leading from the massive coal fields around Tete to the Indian Ocean port of Beira.
Since the announcement gunmen have ambushed several trucks and buses on roads in the central belt of the southern African nation, killing at least two people and forcing vehicles to travel in convoys with military escorts.
So far there have been no reported attacks on the Sena line, a frequent target during the post-independence fighting between Frelimo and Renamo, which was founded with the help of white-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
However, Mozambique media said passenger rail services on the line have been reduced. Foreign embassies have also advised tourists against all but essential travel in the central Sofala province, a Renamo stronghold during the war.