Reports that the Southwest African nation of Angola has banned Islam and begun to dismantle mosques have been dismissed as untrue.

The reports which started making the rounds online over the weekend were rubbished by officials at the Angolan Embassy in Washington, D.C., USA, who spoke yesterday with the New York-based International Business Times (IBTimes).

One of the unnamed embassy officials who spoke with the online newspaper yesterday afternoon was emphatic that there is no such ban, and that the reports are erroneous.

“The Republic of Angola … it’s a country that does not interfere in religion. We have Catholic, Protestants, Baptists, Muslims and evangelical people,” the official was quoted as saying.

A second official at the Angolan Embassy in the U.S. reiterated that the diplomatic seat has not been made aware of any ban on Islam in the country.

“At the moment we don’t have any information about that,” the official told IBTimes via phone. “We’re reading about it just like you on the Internet. We don’t have any notice that what you’re reading on the Internet is true.”

Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos had been quoted in Nigeria’s Osun Defender on Sunday as saying: “This is the final end of Islamic influence in our country.”

An Angolan Embassy official however said yesterday: “The president has been out of the country for a week,” contending that as such he could not have made the remarks as they were reported.

Angola is a majority-Christian nation of about 16 million people, of whom an estimated 55 percent are Catholic, 25 percent belong to African Christian denominations, 10 percent follow major Protestant traditions and 5 percent belong to Brazilian Evangelical churches. Only 80,000 to 90,000 Angolans are Muslim.

•Photo shows Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos.

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