"TotalEnergies accused of complicity in war crimes over Mozambique container massacre", 18 November 2025

French energy giant TotalEnergies was formally accused Monday of complicity in war crimes and torture in a criminal complaint filed in Paris over a massacre at its Mozambique gas plant...

The complaint, filed by the legal nonprofit the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” Mozambican soldiers protecting its compound from an ISIS-linked insurgency.

...[T]he soldiers, based inside TotalEnergies’ concession just south of the Tanzanian border, brutalized, starved, suffocated, executed or disappeared around 200 men in its gatehouse from June to September 2021.

“TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its own facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group of lawyers specializing in international law.

In response to questions by POLITICO last year, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.”

Asked about the gatehouse killings in the French National Assembly in May, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.”...