Prime Minister son’s shooting seen as attack on state

The shooting of the son of Cape Verde’s Prime Minister Jose Maria Pereira Neves on Dec. 30 is an attack on the state and can be linked to the murder of the mother of a police inspector in October, the government said. Neves’ 36-year-­old son, Jose Luis Neves, was shot on his doorstep and is still in the hospital in Praia, the capital of the country, an archipelago of volcanic islands off Africa’s west coast.
In October Isabel Moreira, the mother of the head of a police agency that oversees drug trafficking investigations, was shot dead as she entered her house in Praia. The two attacks are “‘the same pattern of attack on the institutions of democratic law and the state in Cape Verde and is a challenge to the authorities,’’ the government said in a statement.