Mark Thatcher member of coup plot, mercenary tells court
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 08:50:00 06/19/2008
MALABO -- Mark Thatcher, son of Britain's former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was a key member of the plot to topple Equatorial Guinea's president, British mercenary Simon Mann told a court Wednesday.
South Africa and Spain approved of the operation, he added, as did the United States after several oil companies reported that the country was not stable and that a change of government would be welcome.
Speaking calmly, with his hands clasped behind his back, Mann's testimony was translated from English into Spanish by a court interpreter on the second day of his trial in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo.
Mann, 55, said Mark Thatcher's role went beyond raising financing for the failed 2004 bid to oust the oil-rich African country's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Thatcher was an integral part of the group that planned the coup, said Mann, speaking through a Spanish interpreter, he added. Mann said he came in touch with Thatcher when they were neighbors in Cape Town in South Africa.
The South African secret services had also been in touch with him, indicating that the head of the service approved the attempted coup, he added.
A preliminary meeting with the coup's alleged mastermind, London-based millionaire Ely Calil, and others involved had revealed that Thatcher and Calil knew each other, he added.
He said the coup was aimed at installing Severo Moto, a political opponent of Obiang who has been sentenced in absentia to several years in jail, as president.
Mann said Thatcher had been in contact with Moto to transport him to the Spanish Canary Islands off west Africa's coast and then on to Mali to await his return to power in the oil-rich former Spanish colony.
He said Thatcher agreed to pay for Moto's travel costs.
Thatcher pleaded guilty in 2005 to breaking the anti-mercenary laws of South Africa, where he lived at the time. He avoided prison with a suspended four-year sentence and a three million rand (€380,000, $505,000) fine.
Equatorial Guinea has already issued an international arrest warrant for Thatcher, who left South Africa for the United States.
Mann -- who faces a 30-year jail term if convicted -- was arrested in 2004 at Harare's international airport with 61 alleged accomplices when their plane touched down en route to Equatorial Guinea.
Zimbabwean authorities accused them of trying to pick up arms before launching their coup attempt. Mann claimed at the time that the group was on its way to provide security to private mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Although the charge Mann faces was potentially a capital one, Attorney General Jose Olo Obono said the death penalty had been waived as a pre-condition for Mann's extradition from Zimbabwe earlier this year.
Mann told the court he had been well treated during his four-year prison stint in Zimbabwe but said he did not agree with prosecutors' demands that he be given a 30-year jail term.
In the 1990s, Mann set up a security consultancy called Executive Outcomes to protect businesses in conflict zones and allegedly earned millions from Angola to guard oil installations against rebel attacks.
He also set up another private security firm, Sandline International, which was soon being linked to a 10-year civil war in the west African country of Sierra Leone, one of the most brutal conflicts in modern history.
Mann has already implicated South Africa and Spain in an interview with Britain's Channel 4 News from his prison cell in Malabo. He acknowledged having been involved in the coup plot but said that he had not been the mastermind.
He named Calil as having been involved.
Obiang has been in power in Equatorial Guinea since he overthrew his own uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema, in 1979. Under his rule the former Spanish colony has become one of sub-Saharan Africa's biggest oil producers, but the country's oil revenues are a state secret.
Human rights groups say Obiang is one of the worst abusers of rights in Africa.
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