A missionary who survived Tuesday's attack on Chipene, north of the country, said the terrorists ordered the mission to leave the area, where two others were found dead in addition to an Italian nun.

"They sat me down on the baseboard [of a building] and told me that they want us to leave. They don't want this religion [and want] everyone to be fundamentalist," reported the Spanish missionary Ángeles López in an interview with Televisão de Moçambique (TVM) quoted by Lusa.

Besides the Catholic mission, the Islamic community was also in the target: hours before, during Tuesday afternoon, a mosque in the area was attacked, said today the bishop of Nacala, Alberto Vera.

According to the bishop, a team of military personnel discovered during this afternoon two bodies in the bush with signs of violent death while conducting patrol operations in the aftermath of Tuesday's attack.

Ángeles López came face to face with the attackers who are suspected to be coming down from Cabo Delgado, crossing the Lúrio River into the province of Nampula, to which Chipene already belongs.

As the missionary described it to TVM, the attackers were uniformed, armed, and carried chains of ammunition on their shoulder, "a row [of bullets] so that when they run out, they can increase" their firepower.

"When they let me free, I left my sister [Maria de Coppi] dead on the ground and went into the bush," he described.

"My thought was I'm done," but the armed group continued to loot and destroy the facility, sparing her with the message that they want to impose a new order.

"If you don't want to have a worse time, you should leave early tomorrow, I was told," the Spanish nun reported.

Amidst a scene of destruction, Comboni Missionary Sisters gathered today from Chipene to the mission of Carapira the body of the Italian sister Maria de Coppi, shot dead during the attack.

The funeral is scheduled for Friday, in Carapira, in a cemetery of the congregation, more than 150 kilometers to the south, near one of the main roads of the province (Nampula - Nacala), they announced in a statement.

The atmosphere in the attacked region is "desolate" and "of great fear," with the population fleeing towards Nacala, headquarters of the diocese, more than 100 kilometers to the south, describes Inácio Saure, archbishop of Nampula and president of the bishops' conference of Mozambique.

The Italian `site` of the Comboni Missionary Sisters released today a message sent by the sister to a niece about an hour before the attack on the mission.

In it it said that the population was on the run, sleeping in the bush and the public services (nurses, teachers) as well as the administration had already left Chipene because of attacks in the vicinity.

"The situation here in Chipene is not good," described Maria de Coppi, the only one who would not make it out of the mission alive.

"We have no evidence to categorically state that it is a persecution of the Catholic Church," Inácio Saure told reporters today in Nampula, stressing that the group also attacked a mosque.

The Catholic church "is there," on the ground, with a mission where "there was a boarding school, there was food, goods that matter to those who are hungry."

"They stole the goods and then burned the sisters' houses" and the rest of the infrastructure, leading the archbishop to question, "Hatred of the Catholic church or those who have a little more of something" in a poor rural setting?

Inácio Saure pointed out the contradiction of the tragedy in Chipene happening three years after the appeal made by Pope Francis in Maputo for peace in Cabo Delgado.

"The position of the church has always been one of condemnation, vehement repudiation of this inhuman war that takes the lives of everyone, especially poor and innocent people, who don't even know why there is this war," he said.

The archbishop asked for a "joint effort of the whole society and, in the first place, of the country's leaders to seriously protect this people that has already suffered a lot," he added, concluding: "It is especially the poor who suffer and die from this.

Cabo Delgado province is rich in natural gas, but has been terrorized since 2017 by armed violence, with some attacks claimed by the extremist group Islamic State.

The insurgency has led to a military response since a year ago by forces from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), liberating districts near gas projects, but leading to a new wave of attacks in other areas, closer to Pemba, the provincial capital, and in Nampula province.

There are about 800,000 internally displaced people due to the conflict, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and about 4,000 deaths, according to the ACLED conflict registration project.